
Book._ 15~J_ 
Copyrights 



COPYRIGHT DEPOSIT. 



CHRIST 



?h&<ft£o- 



CHRIST 



? 



BY 



S. D. M'CONNELL, D.D., LL.D. 

RECTOR OF ALL SOULS' CHURCH, NEW YORK 






THE MACMILLAN COMPANY 

LONDON : MACMILLAN & CO., Ltd. 
I904 

All right: reserved 






I_i£!»akV , f CONGRESS 
Twe Capies Received 

MAR 8 1904 

. Copyngfu Erttry 
CLASS A. XXc. No. 



f 'Aft ? 



COPYRIGHT, 1904, 

By THE MACMILLAN COMPANY. 



Set up, electrotyped, and published March, 1904. 



NartoooO $«28 

J. S. Cushing & Co. — Berwick & Smith Co. 

Norwood, Mass., U.S.A. 









TO 

A GREAT SOUL 

WHO HAS SEEN THE VISION 

AND SHOWN IT TO MEN, 

MY FRIEND 

WILLIAM S. RALNSFORD, D.D. 

THIS LITTLE BOOK 



CONTENTS 

CHAPTER I 

PAGB 

The Wilderness 1 

CHAPTER H 
The Human Christ 9 

CHAPTER HI 
The Inhuman Christ 25 

CHAPTER IV 
Jesus Christ 67 

CHAPTER V 
The Divine Christ 103 

CHAPTER VI 
The Christian Man . . . . . 131 

CHAPTER VH 
The Christian Church 157 

CHAPTER VIH 
The Christian God 189 

CHAPTER IX 
The Kingdom 215 

vii 



11 The older I grew, the smaller stress I laid on those con- 
troversies and curiosities (though still my intellect abhorreth 
confusion), as finding greater uncertainties in them than I 
at first discovered, and finding less usefulness where there 
is the greatest certainty. The Creed, the Lord's Prayer, 
and the Ten Commandments are now to me as my daily 
bread and drink, and as I can speak and write over them 
again and again, so I had rather read and hear of them than 
of any of the school niceties. And this I observed also with 
Richard Hooker and with many other men." — Richard 
Baxter. 



CHRIST 

CHAPTER I 

THE WILDERNESS 

It seems late in the day, and to some 
must seem an impertinence, to undertake 
a new and independent estimate of Christ. 
Is not the matter settled ? Has not the 
Church explained, defined, formulated, the An 
whole truth in the premises? Are not es^mat^ 
the Creeds full, explicit, exhaustive ? To of Christ 
this I answer, I am not unmindful of Creeds 
and Christological Systems. Almost every 
age has tried its hand at painting a portrait 
of Christ. Some of the limners have been 
artists of the first genius. They have drawn 
with insight and colored with truth. But 
others have been but daubsters, and have 
blurred the lines drawn by their betters. 
Others have been base mechanicals, whose 
pictures are but " item, a nose ; item, two 
eyebrows ; item, an ear." Others still have 
painted caricatures more or less grotesque. 



2 CHRIST 

But the misfortune is that all these pic- 
tures have been superimposed upon the 
same canvas. The result is that the doc- 
trinal conception of Christ as it stands 
Many to-day in human thought is hopelessly 

onone SS blurred and indistinct. Underlying it all 
canvas. there is the real personality, but it well- 
nigh passes recognition. Viewed from one 
standpoint, it shows a poor Pilgrim, weary, 
dust-covered, ready to faint, knocking at 
a closed and inhospitable door. In an- 
other light one sees a wan, pallid, bloodless 
figure, hanging on a Cross. In another, a 
stern Justice upon a judgment seat, sur- 
rounded by all the circumstance of a great 
Assize. In another one discovers a gracious 
Shepherd, like Apollo with his lute, leading 
and guiding a flock. In yet another, a 
divine Majesty, sitting at the right hand 
of a great king. Which of these is the 
real Christ? 

If it be replied, they are all a single 
person in many characters, the world asks 
for some coordinating conception which will 
set them in some intelligible relation with 
each other. Lacking this, it turns away in 
despair of fixing in mind anything definite 
concerning so protean a person. What is 



THE WILDERNESS 6 

wanted is a personality with a fixed charac- 
ter of his own, not an actor who in his time 
plays many parts. The plain fact is, the 
world is puzzled in the presence of Christ. 
The alternatives are not, as many fancy, to 
simply determine whether he is "human" Divine or 
or " divine." Neither of these are simple noTthe 
conceptions. Within either category there antithesis, 
is room for one to play countless roles. 
When the theologian has pronounced him 
to be God, or the naturalist has satisfied 
himself that he is a man, neither of them 
has got much farther along. Much good 
logic and good temper have been expended 
upon this controversy, which, when it is 
settled, is barren until something further 
be learned. Even though it were possible, 
as it is not, to " prove " the Divinity of 
Christ, what would be gained ? The ever 
pressing question is not " What is this Jesus 
which is called Christ ? " but " Who is he ? 
what is he for? what does he signify to 
the world ? " It is here that confusion 
reigns. 

No one who looks steadily at what we 
call the Church can fail to be impressed 
with the fact that it seems to be hesitating 
and uncertain. There are in the world 



CHRIST 



Confused 
notions of 
Christians. 



Consequent 
weakness of 
the Church. 



several hundred millions of people who call 
themselves Christians. They take their 
common name from the common object of 
their worship. It would naturally be sup- 
posed, therefore, that they held some single 
and well-defined conception of that person 
and his purpose and the methods by which 
he proposed to accomplish it, that they 
would move and act and think harmoni- 
ously toward a common goal. Nothing could 
be farther from the fact of the case. About 
the only fixed and hearty conviction enter- 
tained by any fragment of this multitude 
is that the other portions are wrong. Is it 
surprising that busy men begin to think 
that that unanimous conviction is correct? 
All who belong to the Christian Organ- 
ization confess, lament, deplore this confu- 
sion. They see that the divisions are a 
scandal. They are depressed and distressed 
by the Church's impotence, and this all the 
more as they reflect that its raison Wetre is 
to present Christ to the world. This ab- 
sence of unity, the spectacle of separation, 
estrangement, rivalry, and hostility in the re- 
ligous sphere, is one of the strangest as well 
as saddest of things. All confess that it is 
wrong. They see clearly that it, or some- 



THE WILDERNESS 5 

thing else, has well-nigh paralyzed the Church 
as a force in human society. One of the old- 
est and strongest of the denominations thus 
officially states the situation : — 

" In spite of the record of what the Church of 
Christ has done for those races of men who have 
come under its influence, the majority of men to- 
day seem to place small value upon it. It is as- 
sumed to be only one of many factors in civiliza- 
tion, and in a general and rather vague way its 
morality is approved. But it is not taken as the 
supreme standard of faith and conduct; nor are 
its experts, Christian ministers so called, regarded 
as important, and certainly not as essential, members 
of the community. It is true there is an attitude 
of respect to the men of this calling, but as coun- 
sellors of conduct and physicians of souls they are 
neither sought nor welcomed. " 

Recognizing the situation thus far, good 
men and wise ones are busy trying to bring 
unity out of this incoherence, to reconcile dog- 
matic differences and consolidate separated 
organizations. Their success is strangely 
scant. All well-meant schemes for organic 
reunion gain little attention. Compromise 
Creeds are proposed as bases for doctrinal 
reunion, compromise Polities for organic 



Christs. 



O CHKIST 

consolidation, and when none of these find 
credit the churches are fain to be content 
with some temporary plan of cooperation, 
in some region as remote as may be from 
religion. 

The truth is, it is not realized how far 
down and fundamental the difficulty is. 
They fancy that because they all call the 
Different person whom they adore by the same name 
they all mean the same thing. They do not. 
The Christ of the Eastern Church is not the 
Christ of the West. The Christ of the 
Roman Mass is not the Christ of the Salva- 
tion Army. The Christ of theology is not 
the Christ of the average pulpit, and neither 
of these is the Christ of poetry, of art, or of 
popular thought. The everyday man is lost 
in a wilderness of definitions, bewildered 
amid the confused voices of a multitude of 
messengers all speaking at once and all 
speaking variant messages. 

Let us even suppose that this portrayal 
of the situation is vastly exaggerated, that 
underlying all the presentations there is a 
common conception. Still, we must face 
the fact that the busy multitude round about 
the Church believe that the condition is as 
I have said. The task then must be either 



THE WILDERNESS 



to find the real Christ who has been hidden, 
or to convince the multitude that they are 
mistaken. The method would be the same 
with either end in view. 



" To construct out of the Gospels an imaginary 
portrait of one who neither worked wonders or 
claimed to be divine, is to invalidate their worth, 
for it is to literally tear them into shreds. The 
conception of Christ as superhuman is too com- 
pletely incorporate in their substance, too subtly 
inwoven in their tissues, too intimately present in 
every line, to be removed by any process short of 
their destruction. Faith in the Incarnation, with 
all that it involved, has been the sole and exclusive 
source of our historic Christianity. Yet if Christ 
were merely man, this was precisely the one point 
on which either he or his reporters were profoundly 
wrong. Christianity cannot be due to the goodness 
and wisdom of a man, marred by a pardonable ele- 
ment of error ; for it is solely on that supposed ele- 
ment of error that it rests. Its missionaries and 
martyrs, its holy and humble men of heart, all of 
the strongest that human souls have done, all of 
the saintliest that human eyes have seen, will have 
derived their inspiration either from folly or from 
fraud." — " Personality Human and Divine." 



CHAPTER II 

THE HUMAN CHRIST 

" To the Jews a stumbling-block ; to the 
Greeks, foolishness." This is the impression 
which the presentation of Christ by his 
messengers made upon two types of men — 
the conventionally religious and the scepti- 
cal. The former class overcame their stum- 
bling-block, as we shall see, by boldly 
identifying him with the Sacrifice about 
which all their religious ideas revolved. 
The sceptical-minded, on the other hand, 
have endeavored to rescue Christianity from 
intellectual foolishness by stripping it of all 
those elements which cannot be conformed 
to natural reason and experience. They 
would denude Christ of every miraculous 
and supernatural quality with the expecta- 
tion, or at least with the very earnest hope, 
that there will remain the Ideal Man, the 
personage which will still compel homage 
"and be a fair object for the soul's adoration. 

The motives which lead to this attempt 

9 



have no 
creed 



10 CHRIST 

are very strong, and generally of much 
moral dignity. Among the multitude of 
men, sane and earnest-minded men, who 
utterly reject the Christ of the popular 
theology, there are two classes to be con- 
sidered. Probably no better example of 
the first could be named than the late 
Mr. Herbert Spencer. The moral ideal of 
these men is of a very high order. They 
love righteousness and hate iniquity. They 
are honest in thought and speech. But 
Men who they are concerned with all phenomena, 
chiefly on its intellectual or its practical 
side. Their emotional life is not very pro- 
found, or at any rate not very ebullient. 
They are more distressed in the presence 
of intellectual confusion than of moral 
wrongs. They make large and valuable 
contributions to the History of Cults, to 
Comparative Religion, and they manage 
affairs. They organize Charity, and bring 
intelligence to the emotion of Philan- 
thropy. 

But of religious experience they make 
no account, and concerning God they say 
they do not know. Mr. Spencer, for in- 
stance, at the beginning of his great " Syn- 
thetic Philosophy," relegates God to the 



THE HUMAN CHIUST 11 

category of the Unknowable, and immor- 
tality at the end of it to the Undiscover- 
able. For the purpose of a philosophy, he 
has the perfect right to do so. Philosophy 
is only ordered knowledge, and has no place 
within it for ordered ignorance. Not a few 
theologians have proceeded upon the oppo- 
site assumption. But these men escape 
from the perplexities of belief by simply 
having no creed. They can throw stones 
with impunity, if they will, because they 
have no glass houses to be broken. This 
is the attitude of myriads of men to-day. 
Few of them are philosophers, and few of 
them know what the thinkers to whom 
they trust have Teally thought. But their Thepracti- 
general attitude is a vague "agnosticism," cala s nostlc - 
which is, being interpreted, the habit of 
leaving religious questions alone. They are 
little or not at all exercised about the prob- 
lem of Christ. By habit and tradition they 
yield him a place of honor among the world's 
forces, but they do not bow down their 
souls before him in adoration any more than 
they reject him as an usurper. They simply 
let him alone. The form in which he is 
presented to them in current Christianity 
is one against which their conscience and 



12 CHRIST 

their intelligence rebel, but there is no 
other interpretation before them which will 
compel their attention. I believe that there 
is such a presentation possible, and, indeed, 
the prime purpose of this writing is to set 
it forth ; but as things are, this large class 
have never attempted, or have given up, the 
problem of Christ. 

Of the other class, no better instance 
could be offered than the late Dr. James 
Men like Dr. Martineau. This kind of man is both reli- 
Martmeau. gj ous anc [ intelligent. He is attracted to the 
personality of Christ as the moth is to the 
candle, but he is scorched by the transcen- 
dental qualities of the Son of God. He 
essays, therefore, not to put out the divine 
light, but to reduce its heat to that degree 
that he can examine and classify its source. 
In plain words, he would interpret Christ 
entirely within the terms of humanity. 
Can this be done ? And is the result worth 
the pains ? I would not speak slightingly 
or even without reverence of those who, 
within the last century, have tried to fit 
the man Jesus to the needs of the human 
soul. Their motive has been, in the main, 
high and noble. Much occasion has been 
given them. The reaction from a dreamy 



THE HUMAN CHRIST 13 

and artificial theology in Germany, the 
burden of a savage orthodoxy in America, 
the tradition of free thought in Great Brit- 
ain, and the prevalence of the scientific 
spirit everywhere, — these and other influ- 
ences have conspired to produce this purely 
human interpretation of Christ. The won- 
der is, not that it should have been elabo- 
rated, but that it should have impressed the 
world so little. When one considers the 
genius, zeal, and devotion of Unitarians, why does 
Ethical Culture apostles, Naturalistic biog- ^ a a *f t n ~ 
raphers of Jesus, of an Emerson, Renan, and impress? 
Martineau, and when one contemplates the 
simplicity and fair graciousness of the Christ 
they portray, the wonder is at their failure 
to awake any deep or widespread interest 
in it. The only explanation can be that 
there is something fundamentally faulty 
in the figure which they present. Let the 
explanation be w T hat it may, the Christ 
held up by them is a figure so wan and 
pallid, so feeble and evasive, that the world 
looks at it unmoved. Let us try to see 
why. 

The first thing to be noticed is that this 
interpretation of Christ is an essentially 
modern one. It is plain from the record 



14 CHRIST 

that those who came in contact with Jesus 
were all convinced that he differed in some 
way from common humanity. A few saw 
in him something far higher than man, and 
many something far lower, but all some- 
thing essentially different. Some explained 
him as " filled with the spirit," and some as 
possessed with a devil. Either explanation 
would remove him from the category of 
normal humanity. Both explanations were 
given because some explanation was imme- 
diately needed for a personality so bewilder- 
ing. There was evidently about him "an 
ambiguous giving out " which marked him 
off from other men. 

Nor was it his "miracles or mighty 
Christ's works" which created this impression. 
anThiscon- The simple fact is that to the world of his 
temporaries, time there was no such thing as the " miracu- 
lous." The distinction which we make in- 
voluntarily between natural and supernatural 
was a distinction unknown to them. It is 
quite a modern habit of thought which leads 
us to set portent and prodigy over against a 
background of " natural order." They had 
no such conception as natural order ; any or 
everything might or might not be super- 
natural. There was nothing surprising to 



THE HUMAN CHRIST 15 

them in the suggestion that he cast out 
devils by Beelzebub, the prince of devils. 
Actions were by them attributed to God, 
man, or demons indiscriminately. But here 
was one who impressed all who came near 
him as one whose character had in it some 
touch of divine or diabolic, or possibly of 
both. This might, no doubt, be a poor ar- 
gument for the reality of his miracles, seeing 
that they did not have any scientific con- 
ception of what a miracle is, but it is plain 
evidence that they took him to be some- 
thing quite out of the common run of 
humanity. 

Nor was it on account of his superlative 
goodness that they took him to be unique. 
To them his goodness was by no means 
evident. Such as it was, it was of a sort 
which did not fit with their moral precon- 
ceptions. As a matter of fact, the multi- 
tudes who believed him to be something 
different from men did not believe him to They did 
be good. It was simply that there was J^m^ood 
about him something, undefinable but un- 
mistakable, which attracted, repelled, com- 
pelled, or baffled, but which led them 
naturally to regard him as a man apart. 
It is conceivable that they were mistaken, 



16 CHRIST 

but there can be no doubt as to the im- 
pression. This was true of his enemies as 
well as his friends. Neither the scribes and 
pharisees nor, later on, Celsus or Porphyry, 
tried to deal with him as with an ordinary 
man. They never called his miracles in 
question. Even the arch heretic Arius — 
often mistakenly called " the first Unita- 
rian " — never thought of classifying him 
among men. The Christ of Arius was a 
personality so transcendental and exalted as 
would startle many a champion of ortho- 
doxy who might meet him. Arius's heresy 
was not that he did not ascribe divinity to 
him, but that he did not allow him divinity 
enough. 

It is really only within the last century 
that any serious attempt has been made to 
confine Christ within the terms of human- 
ity. The result is not convincing to the 
everyday man's intelligence, and the process 
by which it is reached offends his moral 
sense. The only data we possess are the 
writings of the New Testament. The un- 
Naturaiand sophisticated reader is convinced that here 
raff used"" we nave the memorabilia of unique person- 
together, ality. It is not a natural memoir which 
has become overlaid and obscured with 



THE HUMAN CHRIST 17 

supernatural portents. Excrescences can in- 
deed be removed from it without doing it 
violence. But when it is dissected, it bleeds. 
What we are in the habit of distinguishing 
as natural and supernatural are so grown 
together in the record of Jesus' life and 
of his manifest self-consciousness that they 
cannot be separated. When that is vio- 
lently done, the residuum is either a muti- 
lated cadaver or a formless, artificial, and 
unstable construction. When one follows 
the motions of a scholar or historian trying 
to remove the miraculous from the record, 
he is likely at first to be curious and inter- 
ested, but as the process goes on, a feeling 
of contemptuous irritation overtakes him. 
The whole story may conceivably be a myth, 
a legend, or a fabrication ; but it must be 
taken or left substantially as it stands. 
Naturalistic interpretation of it, however 
learned or acute, becomes solemn trifling. 

Neither Christian nor pagan can contem- 
plate with patience a process which makes Paltry 
the turning water into wine at Cana "an [^ K)nalz ~ 
innocent wedding pleasantry " ; stilling the 
waves of the stormy sea " a happy coinci- 
dence"; the healing of the blind beggar to 
have been effected by means of " the well- 



18 CHRIST 

known healing efficacy of a mixture of 
human saliva with earth " ; the cure at 
Siloam to have been by " taking the waters " 
of a medicinal spring ; feeding the five thou- 
sand, " by hypnotic suggestion " ; the trans- 
figuration, " a sort of mirage caused by the 
refraction of sunlight in mountain mist " ; 
the Resurrection to be a " recovery from a 
long swoon " ; the Ascension to be " the 
interposition of a mountain cloud." The 
plain truth is, this can satisfy nobody. If 
the things did not occur, let us say so, but 
let us not say at the same time that they 
did and did not happen. The honest man 
feels that it is more dignified, at any rate, 
and he believes more religious, to reject the 
Gospel altogether than to accept it in this 
fashion. 

Again, let us say, it is conceivable that 
all this portentous element is legendary and 
pious imaginings, covering up the actual life 
Thepoverty- of a man, and that criticism can remove it 
siduum 116 " an( ^ recover the real personage. But what 
is the use of doing it ? For what is left ? 
" Only the threadbare story of an itinerant 
rabbi, wise and virtuous, who preached a 
pure morality, became possessed with the 
notion that he was the Messiah, and man- 



THE HUMAN CHRIST 19 

aged, by means of a healing power with 
which he was gifted and by dint of good 
luck, to persuade a few silly people that he 
was such. He was persecuted by the magis- 
trates and clergy because he denounced their 
corruption and hypocrisy. He died as a 
malefactor, and he remained dead, like 
another man." One need not press the 
meagreness of this poverty-stricken story. 
Its historical emptiness is of small moment 
beside the moral damage wrought by its 
exhibition. It not only does violence to 
the spirit of history and literature, but the 
average man feels it to be essentially dis- 
ingenuous ; and this suspicion of unreality 
passes over and attaches itself to the Christ 
thus portrayed. Men are, after all, more 
amenable to a religion which is over credu- 
lous than to one which they suspect to be 
tricky. 

I am quite aware that this presentation 
of the case will be repudiated by some as 
crude, not to say brutal. For it is the truth 
that the naturalistic Christian ever shrinks Devout ra- 
from the conclusions of his own logic. S h°Hnksfrom 
Hovering above the crucible in which he Ms logic, 
has reduced the Gospel story, he pleases 
himself by discerning an iridescent ghost 



20 CHRIST 

which he takes in all sincerity to be the 
spirit of Christ. Its outlines, so far as it 
has any " distinguishable in member, joint, 
or limb," are those of a fair and benignant 
Man — wise, gracious, tender, true. His 
words are as celestial music, his life an idyl, 
his strength is as the strength of ten. He 
is humanity's Ideal. His spectral hand 
points a stern finger at the proud, or lies in 
soothing benediction upon the sweaty fore- 
head of the poor and pain-stricken. He 
makes life tolerable by his living, and death 
dignified by his dying. 

For a few souls this ethereal Christ suf- 
fices ; but a lambent phantom it is, for the 
real Christ has disappeared in the crucible. 
The phan- A f ew souls, of a rare and noble mould, have 
tom Christ. f oimc [ satisfaction and uplift in this Christ 
of Criticism. But it may be fairly ques- 
tioned whether, after all, their religious 
sentiment has not reinvested their Ideal 
Man with those qualities of which their 
intelligence has stripped him. It would 
be difficult otherwise to account for or to 
justify the terms of lowly reverence which 
they use concerning him. Their admiration 
runs on, in spite of themselves, to adora- 
tion. But for the average man, under the 



THE HUMAN CHRIST 21 

pain and stress of living, the conception 
is too meagre, thin, unsubstantial. It is a 
pleasing melody upon a slender pipe, but 
has in it no rolling harmony in which deep 
answers unto deep. It has nothing to say 
to the tragic side of life. It only adds to 
the dark perplexity another tragedy, — the 
most wanton, pitiful, and meanest of them 
all, — the martyrdom of the Ideal Man. If 
offered as a stay and consolation solely, we 
must confess that that devoted life is of 
little use. The diaphanous Man thus dis- 
tilled from the Gospel story is too remote 
and subtile, too bloodless and inhuman, to 
stir the emotions or inflame the will. To 
the woman approaching the hour of her 
agony and peril, to the man confronting 
failure, to the soul in the throes of temp- 
tation, this delicately fashioned Christ has 
little power to minister. 

This single consideration would seem to 
be sufficient to account for the smallness 
of the effect which this conception of Chris- The tragic 
tianity has produced, despite the noble side of life 

unsatisfied. 

names upon its rolls. Poetry and Art have 
found little in it. Its hymn books are 
jejune, its liturgies lack vigor, the masses 
of the people will have naught to do with 



22 CHRIST 

it. And this in the face of the fact that 
its adherents have been and are among the 
world's most devoted as well as wisest 
benefactors. It is a gospel which has no 
evangelic potency. To account for this by 
affirming that the mass of men are too 
crass and unintelligent to comprehend it, is 
to condemn it utterly. A Philosophy which 
is too exalted to be comprehended by any 
save the chosen few may be all the more 
respectable on that account. But a Religion 
which cannot touch the common people, or 
which even presupposes a high intelligence, 
is self-condemned. Not the least profound 
of the sayings of Jesus is this : " Thou hast 
hid these things from the wise and prudent, 
and hast revealed them unto babes." 

Wherever men imagine themselves to be 
shut up to the choice between this Christ 
of the illuminati and the Christ of bloody 
Hebrew-pagan cult, they will choose the lat- 
ter. Through it they can at least in some 
crude way express the tragic experience 
of living. The pathos of it all is that they 
should imagine themselves shut within these 
two alternatives. 



" If my feeble prayer can reach thee 
my Saviour, I beseech thee, 
Even as thou hast died for me, 
More sincerely 

Let me follow where thou leadest, 
Let me, bleeding as thou bleedest, 
Die, if dying I may give 
Life to one who asks to live, 
And more nearly, 
Dying thus, resemble thee." 

— " Golden Legend." 

"In an inscription from the Egyptian monu- 
ments, the original of which dates back to the early 
days of Moses, there is reference to a then ancient 
legend of the rebellion of mankind against the gods ; 
of an edict of destruction against the human race; 
and of a divine interposition for the rescue of the 
doomed people. In that legend a prominent place 
is given to human blood, which was mingled with 
the juice of mandrakes and offered as a drink to 
the gods, and afterward poured out to overflow and 
revivify the earth. And the ancient text affirms 
that it was in conjunction with these events that 
sacrifices began in the world." 

— Trumbull, " Blood Covenant." 



24 



CHAPTER III 

THE INHUMAN CHRIST 

The historical fact is that Jesus was put 
to death as a malefactor. The times were 
cruel, and so it happened that the mode of 
his death was by crucifixion. It took place 
on the common execution ground, on a bald, 
round hill, outside the city wall of Jerusa- 
lem. To a Western visitor at the capital 
the sight had nothing noteworthy about it. 
He scarcely singled it out for notice from 
among the hundreds of crosses in every 
province upon which he had seen men writh- 
ing during his travels in the East. If he did 
make any special inquiry about this offender, 
he was told that he had been a rather in- 
teresting, and probably quite harmless, man, 
a dreaming Jew, who had promulgated vague Christ and 
notions about a new social and political or- ^.J^ cia 
der, and had gathered about him a consider- 
able following. It was a pity that he had 
to be taken seriously, indeed the governor 
himself had tried to save him from the con- 

25 



26 CHRIST 

sequences of his own indiscretion, but then, 
you know, the laws concerning sedition are 
very stringent, and none of the laws take 
much account of persons or motives, and so 
the poor man blundered into his fate. It is 
a pity. So the official world answered. 

The religious world explained that this 
was a very pestilent and dangerous fellow. 
Christ and He was utterly without reverence, jested 
worid hgl ° US a ^ ou ^ our most hallowed and long estab- 
lished institutions, spoke scurrilous abuse 
of priests and dignitaries, held and taught 
loose and dangerous notions about God and 
religion, broke the holy sabbath day, told 
the rabble, for instance, that harlots and tax 
farmers were more worthy people than even 
magistrates and clerics. He was a danger- 
ous demagogue, all the more dangerous be- 
cause of his strangely attractive personality 
and the diabolic charm of his eloquence. 
Something had to be done with him. Even 
though no specific charge could very well be 
brought against him, it was better that he 
should be put out of the way than that the 
whole people should be jeopardized. He 
was leading them inevitably to anarchy, 
atheism, and rebellion. He has simply come 
to the end that such men always reach. 



THE INHUMAN CHRIST 27 

The crowd that seethed around the cor- 
don of spear points which ringed the bloody 
square, and mocked at the man upon the 
middle cross, explained that he was an ex- Christ and 
posed fraud and impostor, that he had de- themasses - 
luded them with glittering promises about 
a new Kingdom which he was about to in- 
augurate, a Kingdom in which there should 
have been no rich and no poor, where all 
should have share and share alike, a king- 
dom the least of whose citizens should sit 
on thrones judging the peoples, a kingdom 
in which all should be priests and kings, in 
which every sick and ailing one would have 
his ills cured by magic, where would be no 
oppression, poverty, or toil. All these things 
he promised, and now he has shown himself 
unable to even save his own back from the 
scourge or his own flesh from the Roman 
cross. We are delighted that he has been 
found out. 

A few timid and terrified friends who 
knew him best looked on from a safe dis- 
tance, broken-hearted. Here was the truest Hisdisap- 
and noblest man they had ever known or J^ds 
imagined. He had steadfastly set his face 
toward right and goodness, he had told the 
truth to priest and publican alike, he had 



28 CHRIST 

led his friends near to God, his speech had 
been as the speech of an angel, he had been 
pure and sweet and lovable beyond telling, 
they had even hoped that it was he who 
should redeem Israel. But, somehow, he 
had managed to excite the hostility of all 
the powers, he had been injudicious and 
careless about offending, he had said things 
about himself which when misinterpreted 
had the color of blasphemy. Now all these 
hateful forces have closed in about him and 
brought him to an ignominious and horrible 
end. And they looked him a despairing and 
final farewell. 

A single mercenary of the legion, leaning 
indifferently with arms folded around his 
spear shaft, heard the broken sentences 
which fell from the dying man's bloody lips, 
and marked his bearing, dignified even in 
his extremity, and muttered to himself that 
this time at any rate the law had miscarried, 
this man was surely innocent. 

This is what the spectators saw at Cal- 
vary, — and this is all they saw, — a middle- 
aged man was being crucified. When he 
was dead they went their ways, having seen 
all there was to see. 

But for many centuries myriads of Chris- 



THE INHUMAN CHRIST 29 

tian eyes have converged upon the same 
scene, and have discerned in it, or believe 
they have seen in it, a thing which was not 
visible to the lookers-on. To their eyes the 
Cross has been transformed into an Altar; The pagan 
the Man has been transmuted into a Lamb ; tl ra ° s orma " 
the crucified Galilaean has become a Great 
High Priest ; the soldier with stained spear 
has become an unsuspecting Levite ; the 
gushing blood has become etherealized into 
smoke ascending to the gratified nostrils of 
an angry God ; the turbid crowd have be- 
come, all unconscious, the beneficiaries of a 
Sacrifice offered under the dome of heaven 
for all the inhabitants of earth. 

May the event in history be thus con- 
strued? Is this the true interpretation of 
that great world-tragedy? If not, what 
will explain and account for the strange 
and ghastly fiction ? We cannot disguise 
the situation. If this interpretation be not 
true to reality, we must deny one of the 
most widely current and generally accepted 
notions about Christ present in the Chris- 
tian world. I say accepted, rather than be- Popular 
lieved, for when the notion is plainly stated a onem 
in terms with which the understanding can 
deal, its intrinsic incoherence and its ethical 



30 



CHRIST 



Deemed a 
funda- 
mental 
doctrine. 



monstrosity must compel its rejection. Nev- 
ertheless, it remains as one of those idols of 
the imagination before which generations 
have prostrated themselves, and whose grim 
hideousness is hidden from the devotees by 
the smoke of their own incense. Of all the 
religious conceptions actually existent within 
Christendom, this is probably the one most 
widely diffused. Most Christians would in- 
deed be likely to aver that underlying all 
their doctrinal and ecclesiastical disagree- 
ments they are at one in what they would 
call the fundamental belief that Christ was 
a Sacrifice offered to appease the anger of an 
outraged God, and that it has been so far 
efficacious that it has left God with no valid 
claim against any man who takes the proper 
steps to interpose this safeguard between 
God's judgments and himself. 

" O tree of glory, tree most fair, 
Ordained those holy limbs to hear, 
How bright in purple robe it stood, 
The purple of a Saviour's blood ! 

"Upon its arms, like balance true, 
He weighed the price from sinners due, 
The price which none but he could pay, 
And spoiled the spoiler of his prey." 

It is the burden of the Roman Mass and the 
Hallelujah lasses' exhortation, of the revival- 



THE INHUMAN CHRIST 31 

ist's hymns and the cultus of the Sacred 
Heart. It is the gloomy theme of mediaeval 
art, hangs darkly about the stained glass of 
cathedral windows, is enshrined in a myriad 
pyxes, and is what the wayfaring man takes 
to be the central article of the Christian 
creed at present. It holds conspicuous place Set forth in 
in the accredited formularies of the largest Confessions ' 
Christian churches. The Greek Church 
says : "He has done and suffered in our 
stead all that was necessary for the remis- 
sion of our sins." — Macaire, " Orthodox 
Theology," Ch. 88, Sec. 153. 

The Roman Church says : " It was a sac- 
rifice most acceptable unto God, offered by 
his Son on the altar of the cross, which en- 
tirely appeased the wrath and indignation 
of the Father." — "Catechism," Coun. Trent, 
XV. 

The Westminster Confession of Faith says: 
" The Lord Jesus by his perfect obedience 
and sacrifice of himself hath fully satisfied 
the justice of his Father, and hath purchased 
reconciliation and entrance into the King- 
dom of Heaven for all whom his Father 
hath given him." 

The two conceptions upon which the 
dogma rests are, appeasement of an angry 



32 



CHRIST 



The doc- 
trine must 
not be al- 
lowed to 
wear a dis- 
guise. 



God by pain, and substitution of a victim in 
the room and stead of an offender. We 
must hold the dogma to its real and intended 
meaning. A noticeable tendency is evident 
in contemporary orthodoxy to retain the 
terms of the doctrine while throwing over- 
board its contents. It has begun to be real- 
ized in many quarters that both its ethical 
conception of God and its moral estimate of 
man are unworthy. But the attempt is be- 
ing made to save that sacrosanct thing called 
" sacrifice " by giving it an exalted and un- 
natural meaning. This must not be allowed. 
It has been held before the world for ages 
as the true interpretation and presentment 
of the essential meaning of Christ. If it be 
not true, it ought to be cast out as an in- 
truder within the holy place. Propitiation 
of God by sacrifice and the transference of 
righteousness from the innocent to the guilty 
are of the very essence of it. But these are] 
both survivals from an ancient paganism.j 
To outroot them was the purpose of Juda- 
ism and Christianity. In this Judaism 
failed, and perished through being itself 
slowly transformed into an idolatry. Chris- 
tianity has been saved from a like failure 
only because it has within it the living 



THE INHUMAN CHRIST 33 

Christ. But the time must come, and ought 
not to be far distant, when his work among 
men will be interpreted in terms and images 
freed from the taint of outgrown savagery, 
terms which will not offend the moral sense 
of a world which has been led to leave such 
ethical hetises far behind. 

Propitiatory sacrifice belongs at a stage 
of development through which all peoples 
pass. At that stage God and the devil for 
them are one. They suspect themselves to 
be in the presence of unseen powers which 
are able to help or hurt. Their gods are Religion of 
even such as they themselves are. If they childhood . S 
are unwilling, they can be bribed ; if they 
are angry, they can be appeased by presents. 
The African savage offers his demon a goat, 
the South Sea islander placates his god with 
a plantain, the Phoenician mother burns her 
child to please Moloch, the Mexican priest 
tears the heart from a comely youth and 
holds it dripping toward the heavens. The 
motive is everywhere the same. It is to 
avert the anger or to bribe the good offices 
of a god. At a somewhat later stage the 
" scapegoat " idea enters. Every year at the 
Thurgelia the Athenians dragged a man and 
a woman to the brink of the Acropolis and 



34 CHRIST 

hurled them to death that they might bear 
away a year's sins from the city of the Violet 
Crown. The Romans threw their victims 
from the Tarpeian Rock to the same end. 
In Babylon a young man was crucified at 
each summer solstice to bear away the sins 
of the people. 

It has been a fond device of theology to 
interpret all these cruel customs as uncon- 
scious prophecies of the Great Sacrifice to 
be made at the right time for the sins of the 
whole world, as but fragmentary shadows 
of the Cross flung backward along the dim 
pathway of human history. Especially has 
this been claimed for the bloody rites of the 
people Israel. This claim is utterly without 
Sacrifice support. The whole weight of evolutionary 
tion EV ° 1U " sc i ence an d ordered history is against it. 
These phenomena are coming to be more 
and more intelligible, and indeed to have a 
worth of their own, but this is because they 
are seen to be the natural and spontaneous 
expression of religion at a stage of evolution 
where men are otherwise ignorant and 
brutal. They bear the same relation to the 
religion of Christ that the crude moral 
judgments of savage man do to the morality 
of Jesus. The attempt to interpret him in 



THE INHUMAN CHRIST 35 

terms of primitive cult is to shut up the sun 
of righteousness in troglodytic caves. 

Nor ought we to be any longer misled by 
the theory that the institutes of Moses and 
the Levitical system bear any different rela- 
tion to Christ. The Sacrificial System was 
no institute of Moses, either with or with- Not an insti- 
out divine sanction. What that great reli- J^ses* 
gious master did in the region of worship 
was the counterpart of what he effected in 
the sphere of Law. When, for example, he 
fixed the law of retaliation at " an eye for 
an eye and a tooth for a tooth," he was not 
establishing a code of vengeance. On the 
contrary, he was confining within the nar- 
rowest bounds possible a custom of vengeance 
universally prevalent. It was an incalculable 
gain over what went before to limit the 
thirst for retaliation within the bounds of a 
rough-and-ready equity. The avenger must 
not hurt the victim more than he himself 
had been wronged. The whole Mosaic code 
was, moreover, wonderfully designed to elim- 
inate those " wild justices " which at that 
time it could do no more than restrain. So 
with Sacrifice. It was an ethnic custom, 
universal, extravagant, prodigal, cruel. The 
backward people whom Moses led knew no 



36 CHRIST 

other mode in which to express their piety. 
What he did was to limit the custom within 
the narrowest bounds possible at the time 
and place. He did not pronounce it good, nor 
did he contemplate its perpetuity. His suc- 
cessors among the prophets strove continu- 
ously to give the everyday devotion of the 
people a higher and more reasonable direc- 
tion. Their ideal was not at all the culmi- 
nation and crowning of the custom in a Vic- 
tim whose value would be absolute and pain 
infinite. They looked for the custom and 
the conception of God upon which it rested 
to perish and be left behind. They assert 
roundly that there never was a divine pro- 
vision for it. 1 

The history of Israel is as simple as it 
is melancholy. The Prophets and the Hie- 
rarchy strove together throughout its whole 
course. Finally the voice of the prophet 
ceased and the priests remained in posses- 
sion. Five centuries before Christ that Sys- 
tem which was not of Moses but elaborated 
in pagan Babylon, was set up in all its gor- 
Decadence geous barbarity, and from that time on the 
moral declension of the Hebrews was steady 
and inexorable. Religion was for them the 
1 Jer. vii. 22 ; Hos. vi. 6 ; Ps. ii. 66. 



of Judaism. 



THE INHUMAN CHRIST 37 

placation of a god by gifts ; holiness was a 
ceremonial cleanliness with no moral quality. 
The prophet had cried in vain his " thus saith 
the Lord, to what purpose is the multitude 
of your sacrifices to me ? I am surfeited with 
the burnt-offerings of rams and the fat of 
fed beasts, and I delight not in the blood of 
bullocks or of lambs or of he goats. Who 
hath required this at your hands when ye 
come to tread my courts ? " It was a reli- 
gion of the shambles and the medicine man, 
and broke itself to pieces against the Son of 
Man. His direction was to bury it out of 
sight in the cemetery of the dead. 

And yet within three centuries of his cru- 
cifixion we find this ancient idol enthroned a pagan idol 
upon the altar of the Christian Church! 2^ 8tiM 
What will explain or account for the substi- 
tution of this hideous changeling in the holy 
cradle ? How comes it that the God of our 
Lord and Saviour Jesus Christ became identi- 
fied with Moloch, and the Babe of Bethle- 
hem with the child of a Philistine woman ? 
That the cross was interpreted to the con- 
science in terms intelligible only to Levites 
and Shamans ? It is, alas, only too easy to 
account for it. But before entering upon 
the attempt to explain the presence of this 



38 



CHRIST 



Good men 
standing 
aloof from 
Christian- 
ity. 



misconception of Christ's work it would be 
well, if possible, to estimate the mischief it 
has wrought. Probably most Christian 
Ministers will agree that it is growing in- 
creasingly difficult for them to gain a hear- 
ing for their Gospel. They will agree also 
that those most difficult to win are the good 
men rather than the bad ones. The late 
Professor Bruce — whose orthodoxy none 
will question — has left on record these 
strange words : " I am disposed to think 
that a great and increasing portion of the 
moral worth of society lies outside the 
Christian Church, separated from it not by 
godlessness, but rather by exceptionally in- 
tense moral earnestness. Many, in fact, have 
left the church in order to be Christians." 

The reasons commonly assigned for this 
arrest in the progress of Christianity are no 
doubt real reasons. They are such as, the 
enormous increase in material progress and 
luxury ; the bewildering advance in human 
knowledge ; the restless commercial activity 
which marks the epoch ; the domination of 
the physical sciences ; the stubborn moral 
obtuseness of the masses, and such like. 
But over against these stand the facts that 
the intellectual activity and scepticism of 



THE INHUMAN CHRIST 39 

the Western world of to-day is probably far 
less than that of the Greek world to which 
the Apostles preached ; that the luxury and 
self-indulgence which encompass the church 
of to-day is not a circumstance compared 
with that of the Roman world of the 
Caesars ; that the moral darkness of society 
in our time is light itself by contrast with 
the world in which primitive Christianity 
won its triumphs. 

But there is this difference : the religion 
which the Apostles preached was one whose 
moral ideals commanded the homage of all 
souls which it touched. This remained true 
also for centuries, even after the bleeding 
Christ became the symbol of Christianity. Christianity 
Low and unworthy as was the plan of sal- ^ l e d 1 ™ oral 
vation proffered to the Gauls and Franks, 
to the Lombards and the Northmen, it was 
still immeasurably above the ethical stand- 
ards of their own religions. It is a com- 
monplace of historical reflection that during 
late centuries missionary zeal has accom- 
plished smaller triumphs than during the 
first centuries or in the Middle Ages. No 
people has been converted to Christianity 
for nearly a thousand years. There are, 
no doubt, many explanations of this. But 



40 CHRIST 

there is one which the Christian man can- 
not contemplate but with pain. It is that 
Moral ideals the moral ideals of men have overtaken and 
region be- passed beyond and above those contained in 
hind them, the doctrinal presentations of Christianity. 
Endless labor has been expended to remove 
the intellectual obstacles in the way. It is 
time to remind ourselves that the real diffi- 
culties are moral ones. Not unworthy Chris- 
tians alone, but an unworthy Christ is the 
stumbling-block. It is the bald fact that 
the dogma of the propitiatory sacrifice of 
Christ, which has for so long been exhibited 
as the central truth of Christianity, is now 
rejected by a society whose moral sense has 
outgrown it. The whole scheme of which it 
forms the logical basis is felt to be immoral 
as well as untrue. 

The average man of to-day does not be- 
lieve that human nature is but the moral 
The position wreck and debris of an Edenic man. He 
day 1611 * " refuses to believe that guilt is hereditary in 
any sense, though he knows well that sin 
is. He believes that the law against the 
attainder of blood is written in the consti- 
tution of the universe. He will not believe 
that a course of action which would be 
wrong for a man can be right for God. 



THE INHUMAN CHRIST 41 

He believes that justice and equity are the 
same things for God that they are for man. 
The human idea of justice demands that The law of 
penalty shall fall upon the person who universal, 
offends, and not upon some one in his 
stead, even though the king furnish the 
victim and the substitute be ever so will- 
ing. At a certain stage in moral progress 
Zaleucus, king of the Locrians, could be 
admired and revered. His law demanded 
that the adulterer should lose his eyes. 
When his own son was convicted of the 
offence, his father, to save the sanctity of 
his law and at the same time allow his 
love to act, commanded that one of his 
son's eyes and one of his own should be 
pulled out. The world of that day looked 
upon Zaleucus as a miracle of goodness ; 
the world of to-day can see in him only a 
fond and feeble tyrant. 

Religious thought no longer moves among 
governmental ideas and legal fictions. It 
has become biological. In the processes of 
the spirit the watchwords are not justifica- 
tion, but development ; not salvation, but 
character ; its antitheses are not acquittal 
and condemnation, but living and perishing. 
It is known that hereditary evil is a force 



42 



CHRIST 



Only moral 

realities 

recognized. 



which works within the life, and not a 
penal inheritance passed down from an 
ancestor. It believes that righteousness is 
salvation, and that nothing else is. It be- 
lieves that righteousness in men is the wish 
of God, and that it always was his wish, 
and they do not believe that there is now 
or ever was in the nature or statutes of 
God any obstacle which had first to be 
removed before men could be permitted to 
begin to be good, or in order that God 
might think their goodness good. To a 
world at this stage " vicarious " redemption 
cannot be preached. They will not accept 
it at any price. If they be still assured 
that this is really God's method, they will 
answer, with John Stuart Mill, " I will call 
no being good who is not what I mean 
when I apply that epithet to my fellow- 
men ; and if such a being can sentence me 
to hell for not so calling him, to hell I will 
go." 

The well-meant attempts to find analo- 
Faise anaio- gies for the doctrine in the experiences of 
life are rejected by the intelligence and the 
conscience both alike. Every one knows 
that the good and the innocent are always 
suffering for the faults of the bad. But 



gies for ex 
piation 



THE INHUMAN CHRIST 43 

every one knows also that this suffering 
does not lessen but increases the blame- 
worthiness of them who take advantage 
from this pain. Every martyr of a holy 
cause sacrifices himself deliberately, but 
that does not render innocent the multi- 
tude who stone him. The soldier lays 
down his life on the field to save his 
country, but this does not lessen the guilt 
of the enemy who kills him. The mother 
starves herself that her children may eat 
bread ; the engineer goes down to death 
with his hand on the reverse lever, that 
the passengers may be saved ; the merchant 
pays his friend's debt to save his friend's 
good name. But none of these sacrifices No transfer- 
have anything in common with that inter- ^orai 
pretation of Christ's death which we de- quality. 
nounce. In none of these transactions is 
there anything like a transference of moral 
status or an " imputation " of righteousness. 
They are all, indeed, gathered up w T ithin 
that eternal cross-bearing which is the con- 
comitant of loving. In the heart of their 
blessed company is indeed the eternal Sol- 
dier, Martyr, Mother-soul, who was crucified 
in God before the world was. But they 
have nothing in common with a victim 



44 CHRIST 

bound upon an altar and immolated by a 

priest. 
Who fol- "The Son of God goes forth to war 

lows in his A kingly crown to gain. 

His blood-red banner streams afar, 
Who follows in his train ? 

"Who best can drink his cup of woe, 
Triumphant over pain, 
Who patient bears his cross below, 
Triumphant over pain. 

" A noble army, men and boys, 
The matron and the maid, 
Around the Saviour's throne rejoice, 
In robes of light arrayed. 

*' They climb the steep ascent of heaven, 
Triumphant over pain ; 
O God, may grace to us be given 
To follow in their train ! " 

To see the difference between the two con- 
ceptions of sacrifice one has but to contrast 
that noble song with this, — 

Who hides " Rock of Ages, cleft for me, 

behind him? Let me hide myself in Thee ; 

Let the water and the blood, 
From Thy side a healing flood, 
Be of sin the double cure, 
Save from guilt and make me pure. 

" Should my tears forever flow, 
Should my zeal no languor know, 
All for sin could not atone, 
Thou must save and Thou alone ; 
In my hand no price I bring, 
Simply to Thy cross I cling." 



THE INHUMAN CHRIST 45 

And then call to mind the classic sayings of 
Jesus, " If any man would be my disciple, 
let him deny himself and take up his cross 
and follow after me." And, " Not every 
one who sayeth unto me Lord, Lord, shall 
enter into the kingdom of heaven, but he 
that doeth the will of my Father who is in 
heaven." 

The Christ is, as we will in the proper Bearing the 
place try to see, a personality so exalted, orSsseif. 
and his functions so fundamental and over- 
arching, that it is little wonder the indolent 
mind and feeble will are content with a 
formula for Him that lays little strain upon 
either. It is inconceivably easier to sing 
" simply to Thy cross I cling," than it is to 
take up one's cross and follow in his foot- 
steps. The ecstatic self-abandonment of 
St. Francis of Assisi is ease itself compared 
with the practical devotion of St. Simon 
of Cyrenia. The one hangs upon the cross 
like a lazy lurdan, the other lifts it upon 
his own shoulders and lightens by that 
much the burden of the Son of Man. 

In popular speech the essential content 
of the dogma is expressed by the word "Redemp- 
" redemption." The word means to buy off, 
or to buy back. It is a commercial term. 



46 CHRIST 

The captive held in bondage by Barbary 
pirates or Sicilian brigands is bought and 
set free. The Order of Redemptorists took 
its name from this. They were redeemers. 
Paying a In Teutonic custom the convicted felon 
guilt. ° r could compound for a price, so much for a 
limb, so much for an eye, so much for a life. 
But in what does this resemble the action 
which warranted Bishop Bienvenu to say 
to Valjean, " You are mine ; I have bought 
you " ? or that on account of which the 
Apostle could say to the Christians, " Ye 
are not your own ; ye are bought with a 
price " ? Christ's blood a ransom paid to 
the devil to buy off poor damned souls held 
in his clutches ? a price paid to an angry 
God to allay his fury ? the satisfaction- 
piece of a bond paid to a Shylock Justice ? 
Each and every one of these contentions has 
been maintained by grave and respectable 
systematizers. Augustine, Anselm, Calvin, 
Luther, these are great names. They have 
laid their hands upon the souls of millions, 
dead and living. Honestly believing that 
they were preaching Christ, they have prop- 
agated a gloomy paganism, which has gone 
far to render the cross of Christ of none 
effect. 



THE INHUMAN CHRIST 47 

It avails nothing to be told that these 
gross conceptions are misrepresentations and 
caricatures of the doctrine of the Atonement The naked 
as actually held and taught by intelligent ogma ' 
and well-informed Christians. They are not 
caricatures ; they are photographs. Nor 
will it serve to say with the late Arch- 
bishop Magee that, " so far as they have 
any color of plausibility they rest upon 
the impassioned rhetoric of the pulpit and 
hymn book." Even if this were the case, it 
is to be remembered that the pulpit and 
hymn book are the accredited vehicles upon 
which religious teaching is chiefly borne to 
the people. If their burden is a false one, 
it will rightly be taken for the real one. 
No ; what the Archbishop calls " this rever- 
sion to the worst ideas of pagan sacrifice, 
savoring of the heathen temple and reeking 
of blood," is woven into the very fabric of 
Confessions, Articles, and Liturgies. And 
most depressing of all, it is seriously de- 
fended by scientific Theology. The writers 
of that volume, " Lux Mundi," may be taken 
as the illuminati of their kind. Its article 
upon the Atonement is a reasoned defence 
of the principle of propitiation, and it finds 
its rationale in the Levitical System. " There 



48 CHRIST 

it is, divinely ordained, clearly necessary and 
profoundly significant, pointing to and fore- 
shadowing a perfect Expiation." And, " The 
death of Christ is the expiation of those past 
sins which have laid the burden of guilt 
upon the human soul, and is also the pro- 
pitiation of the wrath of God." The fact 
cannot be disguised that the moral concep- 
tions of current religion have been left be- 
hind by the moral sense of Christian society. 
We come back now to the question of 
how to account for the existence and per- 
sistence of a presentation of Christ which 
the moral sense rejects. I have said that 
it is only too easy to account for, and so it 
is, so far as concerns the historic law which 
controls in such cases. As in commerce a 
Debased and debased currency always tends to drive 
currency a P rec i° us one ou t of circulation, so in re- 
ligion and philosophy a low conception can 
hold the field long against a noble one. 
This is what has occurred in the Christian 
kingdom. But this brings us to the place 
where we should discover when, and where, 
and how, the spiritual currency of Christ 
became debased, when and how his coin 
came to have stamped on one side a sacri- 
ficial bull, and on the other a mitred priest. 



THE INHUMAN CHRIST 49 

To begin with, let us ask the plain ques- what was 
tion, Did Jesus himself conceive of himself f e ^ s ' opin " 
as a propitiatory sacrifice, or his work as 
an expiation ? The only answer possible 
is, Clearly he did not. With the exception 
of two phrases attributed to him, and which 
we will look at more carefully after a little, 
there is not the shadow of a suggestion that 
such an idea ever entered his mind. And 
there is everything in his whole life to 
show that the whole circle of ideas in which 
this conception is embedded was abhorrent 
to him. It is true that the record of his 
teaching is fragmentary and incomplete, but 
there is quite enough in the Gospels to show 
what he believed himself to be, and to be 
doing. If the primal and controlling pur- 
pose of the Incarnation had been to propi- 
tiate the wrath of God by means of a 
painful life and death, surely he would 
somewhere have said so. But it is the one 
thing which he does not say. And can any 
interpretation of him be admissible which 
finds no color in his own words ? He has 
much to say about himself, indeed, he speaks 
of himself so constantly that his auditors 
came to resent it. He presents his mission 
and himself in every form which, as it 

£ 



50 CHRIST 

seemed to him, would throw light upon it. 
What he He represents himself as a Light, to reveal 
caime to q ^ anc [ to illuminate the dark places of 
life. He is a Shepherd leading a flock, 
guarding it against rapacious beasts, feed- 
ing it, seeking the mavericks, carrying the 
lambs in his bosom. He is a Physician, 
diagnosing the ills of men, prescribing med- 
icaments for their cure, laying actual balms 
upon their sores. He is a Tribune of the 
people, disturbing the world's dull and 
ignoble peace, setting a man at variance 
against his father, and the daughter against 
the mother. He is Bread, wholesome for the 
soul's food and needful to maintain life. 
He is Water, to assuage the soul's thirst and 
lave the heart's fever. He is Leaven, to stir 
the ferment in the world's sodden lump 
which shall save it from decay. He is Salt, 
to keep the world's life wholesome and save 
it from corruption. He is the Vine, whose 
juices mount to the remotest branch and 
swell the fragrant clusters. He is the Door, 
newly opened toward the eternal realities, 
through which men go in and out and find 
peace. He is the Preacher, with a message 
of consolation to them that are cast down, 
and of warning to the proud. He is the 



THE INHUMAN CHRIST 51 

Landlord's Son, who comes to correct the 
abuses of the husbandmen in the manage- 
ment of the vineyard. He is the Strong 
Man, the Bridegroom, the Judge, the Christ 
of the Living God. But he does not call 
himself the world's Priest, or the world's 
Victim. That he expected and intended to 
suffer and die is plain enough. He dwelt 
upon the fact to his Mends' consternation. 
But he nowhere placed upon his suffering what he did 
and death the interpretation which it after- ^ claim t0 
ward came to bear. In all his sayings 
which have been preserved, he gives the 
clear impression that he took his pain and 
privation and death as being " in the day's 
work," incidental and unavoidable necessi- 
ties of the task which he had undertaken, 
but not as the task itself. They were the 
price which he had to pay for being what 
he was. But there is no intimation that he 
attributed to them any sacrificial or propi- 
tiatory value. 

To the above statement there are just two 
exceptions. What we have to say about The two ex- 
them may best be introduced by showing ce P tlons - 
them in their context. They are these : — 

" Then came to him the mother of Zebedee's chil- 
dren with her sons, worshipping, and desiring a cer- 



52 CHRIST 

tain thing of him. And he said unto her, What 
wilt thou ? She saith unto him, Grant that these 
my two sons may sit, the one on thy right hand and 
the other on thy left, in thy kingdom. But Jesus 
answered and said unto her, Ye know not what ye 
ask. Are ye able to drink of the cup that I shall 
drink of, or be baptized with the baptism that I am 
baptized with ? They say unto him, yVe are able. 
And he saith unto them, Ye shall drink indeed of 
my cup, and be baptized with the baptism that I am 
baptized with : but to sit on my right hand, and on 
my left, is not mine to give, but it shall be given to 
them for whom it is prepared of my Father. Ye 
know that the princes of the Gentiles exercise do- 
minion over them, and they that are great exercise 
authority upon them. But it shall not be so among 
you: but whosoever will be great among you, let 
him be your minister; and whosoever will be 
chief among you, let him be your servant : even 
as the Son of man came not to be ministered unto, 
but to minister, and to give his life a ransom for 
many." 

and, — 

"And as they were eating, Jesus took bread, 
and blessed it, and brake it, and gave it to the dis- 
ciples, and said, Take, eat : this is my body. And 
he took the cup, and gave thanks, and gave it to 
them, saying, Drink ye all of it; for this is my 
blood of the new testament, which is shed for many 
for the remission of sins." 



THE INHUMAN CHRIST 53 

The significant phrases are those in ital- 
ics, " to give his life a ransom for many," 
and, " shed for many for the remission of 
sins " (Matt. xx. and xxvi., " \y T pov avrl tto\- whence 

\ m " o,-,^ , ' v jl e m " \ "M/^itt comes the 

Ao)^, and " cts acpeaiv a^aprewv )• JNow, ransom 

let it be well kept in mind that these are idea? 
the only two sayings attributed to Christ 
himself which give any color to the conten- 
tion that he regarded himself in the light of 
a propitiatory sacrifice. And let it be fur- 
ther borne in mind, that they are not only 
foreign to but directly opposed to the whole 
tenor of his teaching. The question then 
naturally arises, Where and when, and upon 
whose authority are the words placed in his 
mouth ? If it should appear that they are 
in perfect accord with a conception which 
appears later in the New Testament, and 
that they cannot be made to agree with the 
teaching of Christ, what then ? Only this : 
we will be obliged to confront the fact that 
there is to be found within the writings of 
the New Testament a theory concerning the 
meaning of Christ's work which his own 
words condemn. 

That great and complex thing which we 
call Christianity has from a very early 
time contained within it the facts about 



54 CHRIST 

Christianity its Founder, and also theoretical interpre- 
antnte^pre- Nations of those facts. We maintain that 
tation. the interpretation in question was a mis- 

taken one, and also that the mistake was a 
natural one, however disastrous its effects 
may have proved to be. To be more specific, 
the writer of the Epistle to the Hebrews, 
for example, construed Christ in terms of 
Hebrew Sacrifice ; St. Paul construed him 
in mixed terms of Hebrew Sacrifice and 
Roman Law. In this they both perilously 
misconstrued him. But that construction 
began to obtain before the Gospel was com- 
mitted to a written form. The wonder is 
not that there are traces of it in the Gos- 
pels, but that they are colored by it so 
little. 

The phrase in which the word " ransom " 
occurs is in two of the Gospels. When 
looked at carefully it awakes the feeling that 
it is a pious reflection from a later time, ap- 
pended to a striking narrative which is pre- 
served in the two Gospels in almost identical 
words. The mother of two of the disciples 
approached the Master at a time when his 
popularity was great, and when it looked as 
though his new state might be set up almost 
immediately. According to one Gospel she, 



THE INHUMAN CHRIST 55 

and to another her two sons for themselves, 
bespoke high and honorable offices. His re- 
ply is characteristic. It is in effect : — " You 
do not understand ihe situation. If my 
kingdom were to be like the political powers 
you have in mind, your request would be 
natural, whatever might be said as to its 
taste. That is the very way that place seek- 
ers act, and you are not to be blamed. But 
do you realize the cost which will attend 
upon its establishment ? Are you able to 
pay the price ? " 

When they replied that they thought a pious re- 

,-■!-,! i -it flection from 

themselves able to endure as much as he a later time, 
could, he answered : " You will that, but 
when it is done you will be disappointed. 
For in my kingdom the reward of greatness 
will not be honors, but service. The great- 
est will be he who serves best, even as I my- 
self came not to be served but to serve." 

The thing to be noted is that the argu- 
ment of the incident is completed at this 
point. The appended phrase " and to give 
myself a ransom" introduces an idea en- 
tirely foreign to the matter in hand. One 
cannot but feel that it does not belong there. 
It gives an impression that it bears the same 
kind of relation to the recital of facts as 



56 



CHRIST 



A theologi- 
cal interpre- 
tation. 



Gospels 
written 
traditions. 



does that other formula so common in St. 
Matthew, « in order that the words of the 
prophet might be fulfilled." Over and 
over again when he records some speech or 
act of Christ he assigns as the reason for the 
action or remark, " that the prophecy might 
be fulfilled." This is the motive which the 
annalist imputes to the actor, whereas the 
fact itself shows that it had place for its 
own sake. What he saw in it, however, was 
not so much its intrinsic value as its vindi- 
cation of Prophecy. It looks as though we 
had here a similar interpolation in the inter- 
est of theology. 

It must not be forgotten that the Gos- 
pels are traditions committed to writing. 
The earliest written was at least thirty- 
five years after the death of Christ. Mean- 
time his sayings had been kept alive in 
memory and passed on from mouth to 
ear. Thirty-five years is a good while, 
more than a generation. If during that 
time a theory concerning the Master's life 
and work had gained currency, it is only 
to be expected that it would show its in- 
fluence in shaping the tradition. That such 
a theory did become elaborated within that 
period we shall see. But we shall also see 



THE INHUMAN CHRIST 57 

that it did not come to prevail in such a 
way as to shape the common thought and 
speech of Christians until a much later date. 
It seems therefore more reasonable to believe 
that the two phrases which convey the ideas 
of " ransom " and propitiatory " remission " 
are placed in our Lord's mouth by a later 
tradition than that they were used by him, 
and intended to present a conception of him- 
self which is irreconcilable with his own 
plain words. 

Of course it will be evident that this way 
of looking at things disregards the dogma of The figment 
plenary and infallible " inspiration " of Holy minSon."^ 
Scripture. I do not pause to controvert or 
even to state that dogma. To all useful 
purposes it has been abandoned by Christian 
thought. Effectively for English-speaking 
people it was dislodged from its last in- 
trenchment by the making and promulga- 
tion of the "Revised Version." Not that 
this was the intention of the revisers, but it 
was nevertheless the result. The Revised 
Version is in many ways and places differ- 
ent from the one current before it. If that 
one has had mistake established against it, 
no one can maintain that the present one is 
final. When that fact once got lodgment in 



58 CHRIST 

the common mind, the dogma of infallible 
inspiration became thereafter impossible. 
The only form in which it can be held is 
that "the original manuscripts as they left 
the hands of the writers " possessed this 
quality. But as those manuscripts have 
long ago been lost beyond recovery, reason- 
able men will not spend much time upon 
the academic question as to whether they 
did or did not possess this property. The 
energy of Christian scholars is being ex- 
pended to more purpose in trying to find out 
what they really did say, and under what 
circumstances and under what influences 
they said it. 

The Acts of the Apostles was probably 

written about fifty years after the departure 

of Christ. It is the only record we possess 

The message of the terms in which his immediate ambas- 

°mbassa- St sac ^ ors presented his Gospel. It is written 

dors. by one who was personally familiar with 

the facts, whether or not he had known the 

Master in the body. In his account he gives 

a brief but coherent resume of four speeches 

delivered by St. Peter at Jerusalem, and one 

at Csesarea ; a conversation of St. Philip ; a 

long speech of St. Stephen ; the proceedings 

and discussions of a general council held at 



THE INHUMAN CHKIST 59 

Jerusalem ; and a dozen speeches of St. Paul 
delivered at various places and to all sorts 
and conditions of people. In it we have 
Christ presented by his best qualified inter- 
preters. Here, if anywhere, we ought to be 
able to discern what the men commissioned 
by himself to present him actually thought 
about him. Now, the significant and con- 
trolling fact is that not until we reach the 
very latest speeches of St. Paul do we meet Not offered 
any intimation that his suffering and death asaransom - 
had any sacrificial value. It is true that 
there occur phrases upon which that inter- 
pretation has been put, but it is equally 
plain that the interpretation is a shadow 
thrown backward from a later time. How 
they did conceive of him we shall see when 
we come to study the Eternal Christ. At 
present we are only concerned to show what 
they did not maintain. They did not pre- 
sent him as a sacrifice in any sense analo- 
gous to the thing for which that word has 
stood in the religions of the past, or in the 
prevailing Christian speech of to-day. By 
the evangelic and catholic theologian their 
discourses must needs be pronounced lack- 
ing in the vital and essential element of 
the Gospel of Christ. Which is more 



60 



CHRIST 



No expia- 
tion in St. 
James. 



St. Paul in 
search of a 
rationale. 



likely to be right, his Apostles, or a later 
age? 

The earlier books of the New Testament 
were written approximately in this order, 
— James, 1 and 2 Thessalonians, 1 and 2 
Corinthians, Galatians, Romans, and at a 
much later and uncertain date 1 Peter and 
the Epistle to the Hebrews. No book of 
the New Testament contains so many echoes 
of the words of Christ as the Epistle of St. 
James. Yet this is the book which Luther 
pronounced a very epistle of straw. Had 
the mind of the ex-Augustinian monk been 
less preoccupied by Paul and the Bishop of 
Hippo, he might better have recognized in 
it the real Christ. In this epistle there is 
no suggestion of propitiation. It is too near 
the Master for that. 

It is to that wonderful man St. Paul 
that the world owes a coherent rationale 
of Christ's career. The group of immediate 
personal friends who survived the Master 
were neither in the mood, nor were they the 
kind of men to set down in reasoned form 
the experience which had transformed their 
lives. They were still under the spell of his 
compelling personality, and they were over- 
whelmed by the new-found hope of immor- 



THE INHUMAN CHRIST 61 

tality brought to them by his appearance 
after his death. The single burden of their 
thought and speech was the Resurrection. 
This was the " good news " which they 
never tired of telling. It was good news 
chiefly because it was new. Theretofore, 
like other men, they had not expected res- 
urrection or the possibility of immortality ; 
now they saw their way to it. The thought 
made new men of them, and they were con- 
fident it would make new men of all who 
heard it. They preached the " Gospel of The Gospel 
the Resurrection." And so did Paul, more R 6 surrec- 
forcefully than they all. For a time he tion. 
preached nothing else. But, after a while, 
he began to reason upon what lay behind 
the new-born hope. In his speeches as pre- 
served in the Acts the burden is "immor- 
tality brought to light." The same is true 
of his earlier group of letters. But, later on, 
as he began to theologize, he began to find 
in the death of Christ an " expiation " which 
to his Hebrew mind cleared the way for a 
resurrection. Little by little the emphasis 
is transferred from the resurrection of Christ 
to his crucifixion. Then more and more 
his crucifixion was identified with the He- 
brew and ethnic conception of Sacrifice. 



62 



CHRIST 



A psycho- 
logical ne- 
cessity. 



Finally the resurrection grows thinner and 
recedes, and his pages take on a crimson hue. 
Three interpretations of Christ lie superim- 
posed within his system, biological, legal, 
sacrificial. But in the end the last one 
came to dominate. It is taken up in the 
First Epistle attributed to St. Peter, which 
is an echo of Paul's latest teaching. It is 
finally wrought out to its logical complete- 
ness in the Epistle to the Hebrews — a let- 
ter fitly so entitled. 

It is not surprising that this interpreta- 
tion gained currency. It must not be for- 
gotten that the early Christians, whether 
Roman, Jew, or Greek, came to the new 
religion with presuppositions and habits of 
thought already formed. It is not possible 
for any man anywhere to disentangle him- 
self at once from his old beliefs while he 
takes in a new truth. The most he can do 
is to readjust such of his old convictions as 
lie in immediate contact with the new one. 
But underneath these there is the whole 
contents of his mind. The new truth sinks 
down among these, and is colored by them 
while it transforms them. When he at- 
tempts to utter the new truth, he can only do 
it in language and mental imagery which he 



THE INHUMAN CHRIST 63 

already possesses. It requires long time for 
the new idea to either work over the old 
ideas to its uses, or to escape from them 
altogether by building up an entirely new 
imagery about itself. The truth of Christ 
could not escape this inevitable condi- 
tion. He lived and died in Judea, under 
Roman law, and his life was interpreted by 
Roman Jews. In being transmitted through 
their minds it received a coloring which it 
still retains. The Great Surrender was pic- 
tured in Levitical terms. The Light of the 
world shone out through the stained win- 
dows of the temple at Jerusalem. This re- 
fraction and discoloration must be allowed 
for by the world which would see the Sun 
in his glory. Paul, a Roman citizen as well 
as a Pharisee of the Pharisees, mingled his 
pigments in colors borne from Roman Law 
and Hebrew Sacrifice. One could as well 
construct a zoology as a gospel in these 
terms. Christian thought has been bewil- 
dered and Christian instinct well-nigh de- 
feated by this logically coherent but empty 
scheme. Christ's terms are biological ; this 
one's are legal. And Christianity is at bot- 
tom a life process and not a commercial 
transaction. 



64 CHRIST 

To offset all this, however, is the strange 
and striking fact that the Christian in- 
stinct has in spite of all been true to itself 
The Creeds throughout the centuries. The Church has 
the dogma! never to this day allowed this interpretation 
of Christ to dominate her official Creeds. 
If a truer one be forthcoming, it is open 
to any Christian man to receive it. Not 
in any of the early authoritative state- 
ments .is there an intimation that Christ's 
death was thought to have propitiatory 
value. St. Peter is content to construe him 
as "the Christ of the living God." St. 
Paul himself, when he sums up his belief 
for practical uses, describes him as "God 
manifested in the flesh, justified of the spirit, 
seen of the messengers, preached among the 
Gentiles, received up in glory." Ignatius 
(107 a.d.) says only, " suffered persecution 
under Pontius Pilate." Irenseus (180 a.d.) 
says that Christians believe "in the birth 
from Mary, the resurrection from the dead, 
and the assumption into heaven." Tertul- 
lian (200 a.d.) says, " crucified under Pontius 
Pilate, and the third day raised again from 
the dead." Cyprian (250 a.d.) says, "we 
believe in the forgiveness of sins through the 
holy Church." Possibly the most significant 



THE INHUMAN CHRIST 65 

of all the early statements of belief is the 
long and elaborate Creed of Lucian of An- 
tioch. It is important because it is a clear 
and careful presentation of the fundamental 
beliefs then held drawn out by a trained 
and accredited theologian. It dwells at 
length upon the nature of Christ's person 
and work. All he says, however, upon the 
point before us is, " he became man, the go- 
between for God and Man, the Apostle of 
our faith, the Prince of Life." Of the two 
Creeds which alone hold or ever have held 
catholic authority, one, the Apostle's, says 
only, " was crucified under Pontius Pilate " ; 
and the other, the Nicene, " who for us men 
and for our salvation (a-ajrrjpLav, salutem, well- 
being) came down from heaven," and passed 
through his whole career of living, dying, 
rising. 

The consolatory fact is that Christianity 
has remained Christian in its Creeds even 
when most pagan in its theology. The sav- 
age notion, coeval with the dragons welter- 
ing in the prime, of expiation, placation, 
propitiation, has indeed dominated the un- 
disciplined Christian hosts, but has never 
found a lodgment within the citadel. There 
the Real Christ sits serene. 



" There have been many attempts to explain the 
character and personality of Jesus. My object is 
not to add another to this list, but rather to show 
that the data do not exist which warrant any one 
in attempting to classify him with other men as a 
product of heredity and environment. He seems 
indeed to have been without father and without 
mother. Whoever he was, and whatever may be 
the explanation of his presence, he was an excep- 
tion among men; not in such a sense as to break 
the continuity of humanity, but clearly to make it 
impossible to account for him as we account for 
heroes and men of genius." — Amory H. Bradford. 

" Who and what, then, is the Christ of to-day ? 
First of all, he is the power behind the New Testa- 
ment. Not, to the modern mind, so much in it as 
behind it. Just as science finds in all phenomena 
the manifestation of an unseen, ever present Force, 
so the investigator to-day, turning over the Chris- 
tian records, feels himself at every point in contact 
with the mystery which made them possible. For 
to whatever extent the inaccurate or the legendary 
may have crept into the New Testament, there is 
one thing in which its absolute reliability can 
never be questioned. It represents with the accu- 
racy of a hair balance the impression made upon 
its writers by Christ's personality." — J. Brierlt. 



66 



CHAPTER IV 

JESUS CHRIST 

Christianity takes its rise, not from the 
life or the death of Christ, but from his res- 
urrection. It was not until after that event 
that his personality assumed any world-wide 
significance. If that had not occurred, his 
life, assuming it to have been otherwise ex- 
actly as recorded, would not have been of 
importance. It would have been strange, 
and that is all, and would, no doubt, have 
been long ago forgotten. It was the man 
risen from the dead who arrested the world's 
attention, and it noticed him solely on that 
account. 

Let me say right here, that if any one 
chooses to take up the position that the al- 
leged fact is so inherently impossible and 
incredible that to even consider it is folly, 
I have nothing further to say to him, except 
something like this : — 

We realize quite as fully as you do that a word to 
the Resurrection of Christ is contrary to all aiist^ 1011 * 

67 



68 CHRIST 

human experience, that it is a "miracle" 
of the first order, that probably no amount 
of evidence would establish it. But we 
realize also that human experience is not 
final. What you and we alike call the 
A solitary " order of nature " is after all no more 
nonmaybe or -^ ess than God's routine way of doing 
a real one. things. It has no dynamic in itself. It can 
neither cause nor hinder. It is at least pos- 
sible that a critical point may be reached in 
the experience of a race where something out 
of the common ought to happen. If so, we 
may be very sure that it will happen. The 
difference between Christianity and secular 
Science is that the former takes a far wider 
induction than the latter. All that can be said 
against the event in question is that it stands 
isolated and alone among universal phenom- 
ena. What then ? Cannot a fact be a fact 
until there shall be in the universe another 
like it ? As to the fact in question, we only 
contend that there is abundant reason for its 
being — reason which will be plain enough 
to any one who will take the trouble to look 
for it. 

I assume, therefore, the actuality of Jesus' 
resurrection. What the essential nature of 
this phenomenon was we will have to inquire 



JESUS CHRIST 69 

more carefully later on. For the present, 
it is enough to say that the point in his 
career at which the world first meets him is 
after he had died and was alive again. Even 
his disciples, who had known him intimately 
before, were obliged to make his acquaint- 
ance anew. The place to encounter him is The place to 
the place which he himself determined. He Christ** 6 * 
whom we seek is not the historical person- 
age localized in a Roman province in the 
time of any Caesar, but the transcendental 
personage of infinitely " wide discourse, 
looking before and after." 

The cry, "Back to Christ!" which has The "Back 
arisen sporadically in so many places within ° nst 
Christendom during this generation, ex- 
presses a real and justifiable longing. It 
voices the impatient feeling that Christ 
has in some way become lost in Christian- 
ity, that he has been overlaid and hidden 
within theological definition, thrust out of 
sight behind ecclesiastical organization, si- 
lenced amid the strife of tongues. It is cer- 
tainly true that something has interposed 
between Christ and the people. A religion 
which was meant to be so plain that the way- 
faring man might comprehend, has come to be 
thought of as abstruse, complex, and obscure. 



70 



CHRIST 



Futility of 
attempt to 
reproduce 
the scenery - 



But while the longing is intelligible and 
praiseworthy, one is bound to confess that 
the means taken to gratify it have not sat- 
isfied. The truth is, the pilgrims have gone 
back in quest of the wrong Christ. A wealth 
of labor, learning, and even genius, have been 
expended during the last half century in the 
attempt to reproduce the historical person- 
age and make him real. The scene of his 
life has been studied and photographed to 
its minutest detail. The naive Gospel story 
has been expanded into " Lives of Christ " 
by the score. His antecedents have been 
traced in Jewish heredity. His dress, food, 
manners, speech, surroundings, have been 
reconstructed with infinite devotion, and 
no doubt with substantial accuracy. More 
information about the human life of Christ 
is taught every day in mission Sunday- 
schools than Athanasius, or possibly Paul, 
possessed. But when all is done, the ear- 
nest man is not much less helpless and bewil- 
dered amid these accessories than was his 
ancestor amid fine-spun theologies. He can- 
not see the forest for the trees. 

The life of Jesus does become of absorb- 
ing interest and prime importance, but only 
in its proper order. Not until the world's 



JESUS CHRIST 71 

interest was engaged with the risen Christ 
did it even try to remember, much less re- 
cord, the story of his life. It was the news 
of the resurrection which arrested attention. 
The belief in it has, in sober verity, wrought 
the most momentous result within human 
history. It transformed man's estimate of 
himself and of God. The fact was the essen- 
tial content of the Apostles' evangel. Their The Gospel 
burden was not atonement, or redemption, ^Stencef^ 
or heaven, or hell, but the announcement of 
the possibility of continued existence for 
the individual man as a consequence of the 
event which they heralded. Men who could 
comprehend their " good news " welcomed it 
with the same kind of awed enthusiasm as 
would one to-day who should have offered 
to him a method whereby he could add fifty, 
a hundred, a thousand years to his natural 
life. Their argument was that Jesus had 
made an experiment with human living, and 
had demonstrated in his own person that 
death need not defeat life, and also that he 
had become a kind of first-fruits of an im- 
mortal harvest which might be abundant if 
men so chose. It is no doubt quite impos- 
sible for us to picture with what eagerness 
this message was hailed, or how overwhelm- 



72 CHRIST 

ingly it took possession of the minds and 
imaginations of men who before had no ex- 
pectation of future life of any kind. It is 
no longer news to us. The original appeal 
of the Gospel was to the supreme aspiration 
of all sentient beings, the " lust of living." 
It is little wonder that the first title ascribed 
to him was the " Lord and Giver of Life." 
And it is as little wonder that that appeal 
was so immeasurably more successful than 
the sordid one to the fear of damnation 
which has been made for now these many 
centuries ! 

Our first introduction, both in the order 
of thought and the order of history, is to 
the Risen Christ. But this having been 
made, the inquiries spring up, — What is 
he ? and what does he signify ? 
First disci- The first converts apparently made little 
^analysis. or no effort to estimate his nature. They 
were content to take the Gospel as preached. 
They believed that if they lived according 
to the " Way " announced, they would, like 
him, survive their own deaths. Indeed, it 
may fairly be said that the working for- 
mula of Christianity has always been the 
same, with the modification that " eternal 
happiness " has been substituted for " eter- 



JESUS CHRIST 73 

nal living." But the common notion now 
current that men are naturally immortal in 
any case, and that Christ's function is only 
to affect the pleasurableness of the next life, 
was unknown among them. They were 
convinced that by his Way only, could they 
outlast death, and that by any other way 
they would perish out of being. The po- 
tency of this belief to affect their conduct 
is apparent. The steadfastness of the early christians 
Christians in the face of obloquy, persecu- ^persecu- 
tion, and torture has long been a gratuitous 
puzzle to historians. Of all the ingenious 
explanations, marshalled by Gibbon and his 
like, for the marvellous spread of the Gos- 
pel in the first two centuries, this sufficient 
one is about the only one omitted. One 
may believe that they were mistaken in 
their conviction, but wherever one did hold 
it, it rendered him proof against all assault. 
For what signified a few days' hunger, or a 
few hours on the cross, or a few moments in 
the fangs of the lions, so long as endurance 
meant endless existence, and surrender 
meant falling back into a few years longer 
life at best, with annihilation at the end of 
it ? Human life is not at any time so well 
worth the living, that one could be easily 



74 CHRIST 

frightened back upon it when he had the 
chance to exchange it for one which he be- 
lieved to be far better, and which could not 
well be worse. 

Precisely in what manner they thought 
continued being to be bound up with his 
Way they do not seem to have inquired. 
The scanty allusions to the movement in 
secular history make it plain that the out- 
side world looked upon it as a pitiful 
delusion. Alternately they admired the 
Christians' fortitude and were incensed at 
their stubbornness. Meanwhile, the belief 
spread, and all weapons against it were 
impotent. It was not until from forty to 
sixty years after Jesus' disappearance that 
any rationale of this new life was attempted. 
St. Paul and Then, first of all, St. Paul undertakes the 
hope! eW task. He explains, however, in terms which 
are most difficult to construe. Never was a 
more exasperating expounder than he. He 
passes from scientific precision to vivid met- 
aphor, and from that to emotional rhapsody, 
and round again through the same circle 
with such swiftness and unexpectedness, 
that one is hard put to it to follow. His 
controlling formulae are something like 
these : the Christian " is in Christ " or 



JESUS CHRIST 75 

" Christ is in him " ; or both "are bound up 
together in his dying " ; or " his life is hid 
with Christ in God " ; or " Christ is in him, 
the hope of glory " ; and such like. Strictly 
speaking it is not a rationale of the phenom- 
ena at all, but infinite variations upon the 
theme that Christ has, by his steadfast per- 
sistence in his Way, attained to the resur- 
rection from the dead, and that any other 
through the same Way may reach the same 
goal. 

It is quite plain, however, that the matter 
could not remain in that shape. Human 
nature always craves for the reasons of 
things. The Church was now numerous 
and widespread. But it was composed 
almost entirely of people who knew of 
Jesus only at second hand. The spell of 
his immediate presence had lifted. The why the 
people must needs ask, Who and what is ^rewrit- 
this person into whose hands we have com- ten 
mitted our very existence ? It is patent 
that the Gospels were written in answer to 
this demand. Their very terms make this 
plain. What more natural than that these 
men who had understanding of all these 
things from the beginning should tell their 
story ? 



76 CHRIST 

To see the Christ of the Gospels it is not 
needful to inquire minutely into their date 
or authorship, or about their accuracy in 
details. These are questions for scholar- 
ship, and in their place important. But 
the main thing has been settled long ago. 
Everybody admits that they are memorabilia 
of Jesus, preserved by his contemporaries 
and sympathetic friends. If their portrait 
of him does not show up in bold outlines, 
we may lay it aside rather than attempt 
with lenses to construct a picture from con- 
fused lines. We may also, if we choose, 
disregard for the present the stories of the 
Infancy. All his disciples made his acquaint- 
ance first as a full grown man. Their 
opinion of him was formed before they 
thought to inquire concerning his birth and 
parentage. 

No biographers ever kept themselves so 
completely out of sight, as the writers of 
the first three Gospels. Nothing whatever 
is known certainly about them. Mark, by 
his name and his general attitude, suggests 
that he was a Roman. Matthew's Gospel 
is certainly from the recollections of a Jew. 
It appears incidentally that Luke was a 
physician. This is practically all the in- 



JESUS CHRIST 77 

formation concerning themselves that they 
have permitted to transpire. Their motive 
was a single one, to set down with the ut- 
most accuracy all that they could remember 
or could certainly ascertain of the words, 
actions, and movements of their Master. 
The writer of the Fourth Gospel subordi- 
nated this to another motive which we will 
examine later. 

Here, then, in the Synoptic Gospels, we The Gospel 
have the story as it was told at the demand rama " 
of a people who already accepted and lived 
by the fact of the Resurrection. Without 
that belief it would not have been written, 
and without that belief brought to it, it 
would have been at once incredible and un- 
intelligible. All four Gospels really begin 
the story at the same point. They date its 
commencement from the time of a religious 
revival, which had place in Palestine in the 
fifteenth year of the Emperor Tiberius, while 
Pontius Pilate was Procurator of Judea, 
Annas and Caiaphas being High Priests at 
Jerusalem. The stage was held by the stern 
and picturesque prophet, John the " Bap- 
tizer." Then a Jewish carpenter steps to 
the centre, and John makes his exit. The 
biographers thereafter confine themselves to 



78 CHRIST 

his movements. This is the original story, 
and in Mark it stands thus. But in each of 
the other Gospels the drama is prefaced by 
a different prologue. By Matthew the gene- 
alogy of the central character from Abraham 
down is hung up against the scenes, together 
with an account of his birth and parentage. 
By Luke a different genealogy is posted, 
along with a variant story of the Infancy. 
John prefixes a divine chorus, after the man- 
ner of the Greek tragedies. But from that 
point the drama of Jesus' life proceeds. 
When we study it the problem may be 
stated thus : — 

What did he conceive himself to be ? 

What did he conceive himself to be doing? 

Disciples What did his friends believe him to be ? Let 

know** us ^ a ^- e ^ ne ^ as ^ mc L u i r y first. It is plain 
clearly what that before they wrote the first word they 
held him to be a man in some way apart 
from common humanity. In this opinion 
the people for whom they wrote shared. 
But just what they held him to be is not 
plain. The strong impression is made that 
they did not know. That dogmatic certi- 
tude, that assumption that everything could 
be exhaustively stated, which marks and 
mars the later Christologies, is altogether 



JESUS CHRIST 79 

absent from the New Testament. We may 
say indeed that confident assertiveness is 
always in inverse proportion to the felt 
nearness of divine things. One can define 
God the more confidently the farther away 
from him he is. A certain tender hesitation, 
a reverent doubtfulness, if one may use the 
phrase, marks the attitude of the disciples. 
That feeling is itself, perhaps, the best in- 
dication of what they thought of him. Two 
things manifestly impressed them chiefly — 
the marvellous spiritual illumination of his 
speech, and the marvellous power he showed 
in dealing with the forces of Nature. The 
first of these is but illy defined as " sinless- 
ness." Faultlessness is but a tame and nega- 
tive quality, and they make but little of it. 
They represent him as not only impeccably 
good, but dynamically good. The wisdom 
which they remembered in him was not at 
all the wisdom of the sage or the philoso- 
pher, but that deeper wisdom to which the 
human heart responds. To this end they 
preserve his parables, his sermon on the 
mountain, the profound and tender table 
talk of the last evening they were with 
him, his answers to inquirers, and his replies 
to challengers. 



worker. 



80 CHRIST 

They recount the instances of his healing 
the sick, restoring sight to the blind, walk- 
ing on the water, cleansing the leprous, 
stilling the storm, reading the secret thought 
of the living, and bringing the souls back to 
No wonder- the dead. The surprising thing is that they 
were not surprised. It seemed all natural 
and in keeping for such a person to do such 
things. They make no vaunt of them or of 
him for their sakes. They are frank, on the 
contrary, to record that he thought of those 
powers but slightly, never used them to his 
own advantage, used them at all reluctantly, 
and always held them subordinate to his 
main purpose. Nothing could be presented 
more unlike the vulgar wonder-worker, an 
Abognotus or a Cagliostro. To them he 
was plainly not a wonder-worker, but a 
person from whom on other accounts one 
might expect marvels. The miracles and 
mighty works do not encumber the narra- 
tive nor interrupt it. They are of the sub- 
stance of it and render it coherent. To the 
biographers he was at least superhuman. 
But when they were challenged by him, as 
they were more than once, to speak out 
what they thought of him, they hesitated. 
Either they were not certain, or they had 



JESUS CHRIST 81 

no terms in which to phrase it. Most of 
them were content to say that he was a 
" prophet." 

Now a prophet was a character with 
whose idea they were at home. He was 
a man who, in addition to his qualities as 
a man, possessed certain other endowments 
in virtue of which he was able, within 
limits, to produce phenomena impossible 
to other men. For a while this seemed to 
be a formula sufficient for the case ; but 
before long it was seen to be so manifestly Not a 
inadequate that it was abandoned. A few prop e ' 
thought of him as " that Prophet," i.e. the 
legendary seer and wonder-worker of tradi- 
tion and religious folk-lore who was gifted 
of God above his fellows. But this notion 
gained little currency. The truth was it 
fitted him so illy that it could not cling. 
There was indeed a character extant which 
would describe him, but for a long time 
they hesitated to use it. It was that of 
the Jewish " Messiah." That was the title 
of an ideal personage held by the Jews in 
supremest reverence, but whose nature and 
qualities were most vague and confused. It 
is not possible to this day to find out with 
certainty what the Jew means or meant by 

G 



82 CHRIST 

the Messiah. Rabbi gainsays rabbi, and 
historian disagrees with historian. One 
thing can be said, however, about every 
presentation of the character. He was con- 
ceived to be a person higher than man and 
lower than God. He possessed some of the 
attributes of both and not all of either, and 
had immediate relations with both. It is 
not surprising, therefore, that this title was 
The perplex- fixed upon Jesus, or that it is the name by 
"Messiah." which, in its Greek form, the " Christ," he 
is known to this day. It satisfied better 
than any other term could the immediate 
craving for a definition. For that purpose 
it is indeed inadequate, but it was the high- 
est and truest available. Nor is damage 
wrought by its use save when ill-informed 
piety strives to shrink the Son of God 
within the compass of a Hebrew concep- 
tion. This, so far as the biographies serve, 
is the highest point reached by the three 
first Gospels in their interpretation of Christ. 
He was a "prophet"; or he was "Elijah"; 
or he was the " Messiah " ; and beyond this 
they did not go. 

It is fitting now to ask, What did Jesus 
regard himself to be doing ? No one read- 
ing the Gospels can miss seeing that he 



JESUS CHRIST 83 

regarded himself as one who had a definite 
and distinct purpose to accomplish. There 
is no feeling about and waiting upon cir- 
cumstances. When a mere lad, he expressed 
surprise that his parents did not know that 
he " must be about his Father's business." 
When near the end of his career, and tired, 
he broke out with the exclamation, " I came 
to kindle a fire upon the earth ; how I would 
that it were already kindled ! " What, then, 
was the task which he conceived to be dis- 
tinctively his own ? Whatever it was, it 
may go without saying, he believed that if 
he did not accomplish it, it must remain 
forever undone. 

There are two paths generally open to 
the great and sympathetic soul touched by 
the world's wrong. One is to teach right- 
eousness, the other is to organize righteous- 
ness ; to be either a preacher or a reformer. 
Jesus chose neither. He added little or His small 
nothing to the world's stock of theoretical ^Sis™ 1 
morality. Probably all of his noblest say- 
ings may be matched from Socrates or 
Moses, from Seneca or Guatama. The 
great company of preachers has served the 
world well, but Jesus is not among them. 
No more did he conceive his task to be to 



84 CHRIST 

reform society. God knows, the social, po- 
litical, and economic order amidst which he 
lived was rotten enough. It was a drunken, 
lustful, cruel, and unjust world. The field 
for a reformer was ripe to the harvest. 
There were laborers ready — not many, but 
Not a re- very willing. A crusade might have been 
organized against the actual wrongs, evils, 
and oppressions of life. Had he put him- 
self at the head of it, with his unparalleled 
powers, inspired it with his indomitable 
courage, inflamed it with his divine enthu- 
siasm, one might think it would have swept 
out west and east from Galilee and cleansed 
the world. Indeed, the thought did come 
to him, and tempted him mightily. All the 
kingdoms of the world and the glory of them 
lay before him. But he deliberately turned 
away from that path. What then ? If his 
metier was neither to teach men goodness 
nor to change their condition, what was it ? 
Two words dominate all his speech, — 
"Life" and "Death." With these two 
phenomena, which are really one, he con- 
cerned himself entirely. His problem was, 
What can be done with the individual 
human existence ? Can it be extended be- 
yond the term which we call natural ? And 



JESUS CHRIST 85 

if so, how ? The eternal absurdity is that The absurd- 
men die. The higher the individual rises 1 y ° 
in the scale of being, the more he revolts 
from the necessity. It puzzles his under- 
standing. It stultifies his consciousness. 
What he really shrinks from is, not the act 
of dying nor the fear of anything beyond, 
but the instinctive horror of being dead, — 

11 That sense of ruin which is worse than pain, 
That masterful negation and collapse 
Of all that makes me man ; as though I bent 
Over the dizzy brink 
Of some sheer, infinite descent, 
Or worse, as though 

Down, down, forever I was falling through 
The solid framework of created things, 
And needs must sink 
Into the vast abyss 1 " 

This inescapable horror is the unique 
experience of man. He can disguise it, 
accept it, jest at it, forget it, damn it, ac- 
cording to his mood, but it is, after all, the 
determining force in his action. It increases 
just in proportion as his nature climbs and 
expands. The brute knows it not. The 
brutelike man is touched by it little, if 
at all. But, in measure as the individual 
consciousness of being deepens and expands 
and entangles itself with ever extending 



86 CHRIST 

relationships, it is the more oppressed by 
this brutal surd. 
Christ and To this primal need of humanity Jesus 
ervation" addresses himself. Whatever he accom- 
plished was accomplished here. His prob- 
lem and his task were biological. But he 
takes it up at the point where the human 
biologist lays it down. Is the individual 
human life composed of such stuff, or does 
it contain within it such qualities, or can it 
be moulded to such potencies that it can 
break through the barrier called Death ? 
This is the question he asked ; and the 
answer is ChristiaDity, and nothing else is. 
At this point a strenuous and sustained 
effort is demanded to empty our thought 
of some persistent misconceptions. It is, 
indeed, most difficult for us at this day to 
attach the same meanings that he did to 
the words which he used. In religious 
phraseology, the antitheses " living and dy- 
ing," " surviving and perishing," " salvation 
and destruction," have been for so long a 
time used in secondary and metaphorical 
senses that it is hard to realize that in his 
mouth they had their plain and literal sig- 
nificance. He concerns himself with the 
phenomena of the personal life. His theme 



JESUS CHRIST 87 

was, not the happiness or the misery of two 
contrasted kinds of future existence, but 
existence itself. Can a man in any wise 
overcome death, and if so, how ? Of course, 
such an inquiry must lead one at times to 
a point where the quality of the new exist- 
ence comes into view, but this never engages 
his attention long, and is always subordi- 
nated to the main theme. 

He pronounces at the outset that the 
thing is possible, but difficult. He intro- 
duces it under the category of a " Kingdom." 
But the moment that word is pronounced, 
we have to be on our guard lest we miss 
its meaning. He uses the term habitually Christ's bio- 
in its biological and not its political sense. ^Sj, m< 
In other connections we are familiar with 
that use. We speak of the Mineral " King- 
dom," the Vegetable " Kingdom," the Animal 
" Kingdom." In no other sense does he use 
the word for his New Kingdom, the Kingdom 
of Heaven. It is a scientific Classification. 
Had naturalists and scientific men instead 
of metaphysicians and jurists formulated 
Christian theology, the world would have 
been spared an incalculable confusion. For, 
in very truth, it is the naturalist's legitimate 
field. But ages ago the truth of Christ 



88 CHRIST 

was interpreted in terms of law instead of 
biology. The result has been that the very 
words of the Master have had fixed upon 
them an unnatural meaning from which it 
will be long before they recover. But his 
lauguage is more intelligible to-day than it 
has been at any time in the past. In the 
great cycle of human thought, modern Sci- 
ence has brought into common use the 
mental forms into which his words fit. 

But there the words stand, and they are 
plain enough to him who scans them with 
an open mind. His Gospel is the " Gospel 
of the Kingdom " ; that is, the new Order of 
Entrance is, existence, the " New Man." Those who find 
kingdoms their way into the New Kingdom live because 
by being life is the law of that Kingdom ; those who 
fail or neglect to do so much are left where 
they belong, under the old, brutal neces- 
sity of perishing. He points out what the 
condition of entrance into the New King- 
dom is. It is by transformation — transmu- 
tation rather — of the life which the indi- 
vidual shares with the form next below. 
" Except ye be born again ye cannot enter 
into the Kingdom of God." This "being 
born again " is, to his view, not so much a 
metaphor as a scientific statement. Birth 



JESUS CHRIST 89 

is a curious thing ; it is an epoch in the 
progress of an individual life. It is not 
the beginning of it. The subject of it has Thephe- 
reached the end of a stage of development birth> 
before he can be born. Birth is only the 
entrance upon a new phase. Jesus does not 
present the new birth as the beginning of a 
soul, but as a radical change in its relation- 
ships. It cannot be " born again " until it 
has been born once. Nor does birth guaran- 
tee the continuance in life of the thing born ; 
it only gives it opportunity. His dictum is 
that there is a Way whereby the natural life 
of an individual human creature can be so 
modified as to become endowed with an 
immortal quality. The new creatures thus 
produced — their origin, their phenomena, 
their laws, their fortunes — he includes in 
a New Kingdom. He points out that the 
entrance into this New Kingdom, as might 
be expected, differs in essential features 
from that into the kingdom next below. 
It is difficult to achieve, and its pain is for 
the creature being born, and not for that 
from which it springs. In this Kingdom 
the pangs of parturition are borne by the 
child and not the parent. The gate is strait 
and the path narrow that leadeth into life, 



90 



CHRIST 



and relatively few find it. He affirms that 
the purpose of his presence has to do with 
this process, that men might have life — life 
more abounding and persistent than they 
now experience. 

Nor does he leave any doubt as to the 
means by which it is to be won. It comes 
by knowledge, but by knowledge of a spe- 
cific kind. " This is eternal life, to know 
God. He that heareth my word and be- 
lieveth on him that sent me hath eternal life, 
and shall escape the crisis which awaits other 
men, for he is passed from death into life." 
Life is corre- Life at any stage of being is dependent upon 
knowing the realities amid which it is set. 
Neither brute nor man can survive except as 
he knows his surroundings. Ignorance is sui- 
cide. It is a threadbare dictum of the great 
Synthetic Philosopher that "life is condi- 
tioned upon adaptation to environment." 
Eternal life is conditioned upon the discovery 
of the environing God. This is the open secret 
of Christ. Eternal life is a stage of evolution, 
difficult, but possible. The individual is mor- 
tal; but he may reach to immortality for him- 
self, and presumably for his offspring, if he 
follow the law for that case made and pro- 
vided. This process he calls the Way of Life. 



spondence 
with envi- 
ronment. 



JESUS CHRIST 91 

To exhibit the proof of all this would be 
to quote substantially the larger part of the 
New Testament. It is sufficient to warrant 
the confident assertion that this conception 
dominates and coordinates his whole teach- 
ing. It all revolves about the new life of The ex- 
the individual man. It widens out into the tence^Mhe 
thought of a society composed of such twice- individual, 
born souls. It contemplates the action and 
interaction between such a society and the 
natural world. It anticipates the ultimate 
dominion of such a society, and the ulti- 
mate decay of all things and persons as 
cannot be wrought over to its uses. It is 
the Novum Organon for the universe of Man. 
All his sayings, arguments, parables, apho- 
risms, metaphors, are dominated by this con- 
trolling principle. His imagery is drawn 
almost exclusively from the processes and 
phenomena of life. " God so loved the world 
that he gave his only begotten Son that 
whosoever believeth on him should not per- 
ish, but have seonian life." " That which is 
born of the flesh is flesh ; that which is 
born of the spirit is spirit. Do not be sur- 
prised, therefore, when I say unto you that 
except a man be born again he cannot see the 
Kingdom of Heaven." The place of every 



92 CHRIST 

* creature in the scale of being is determined 

by its procedure. " For every plant is 
classified by the fruit it bears. Men do 
illustrations not gather figs from the acanthus nor grapes 
phenomena, from brambles. A good plant cannot pro- 
duce bad fruit, nor a bad plant good fruit. 
But every plant which bringeth not forth 
good fruit is cut to pieces and thrown into 
the fire." The spiritual life follows the 
natural both in order and method. " For 
as the Father quickeneth dead matter into 
living form, so the Son quickeneth whom 
he will." " He that hearkeneth unto my 
word and hath confidence in him that sent 
me, hath seonian life in himself, and moves 
not to destruction, but hath passed from 
the dead into the living." " I declare unto 
you that if a man keep my saying he shall 
never see death." " Leave the dead to bury 
their dead and come follow me." His own 
conception of his mission is unmistakable. 
It was to open up the Kingdom of life to 
the individual fit to enter into it. His 
teaching was the theory ; his life was the 
demonstration. 

We must now face the question, How 
does he say that the individual being of 
this new Order is produced ? It is a prob- 



JESUS CHRIST' 93 

lem analogous to that of the origin of life, 
the origin of Species, the origin of Man. It 
is the final biological problem to be solved 
on this earth, but its solution belongs on 
this earth. What is the origin of the New The origin 
Man, the creature who is classified in a new ^ n 6 ew 
Order, viz. the Kingdom of God ? The world 
was never so ready to comprehend Christ's 
answer as it is now. One might say rever- 
ently that Jesus was the first Evolutionist, 
if it were not more true to say that God is 
that. Maybe we shall find that it is the 
same thing. Let us bear in mind that the 
question before us is not at this stage a 
" theological " one at all. It is the account 
of the origin and existence of the highest 
form of life extant. The only difference 
arises from the fact that the study of this 
form leads its student toward the future, 
and not back toward the past. " For it 
doth not yet appear what we shall be, but 
we know that when he shall be manifest 
we shall be like him." It is the stage of 
evolutionary progress at which the highest 
extant being now is. For the last term in 
the ascending series is not Man, but the 
New Man. Let me urge once more that 
this language is not metaphoric, but precise. 



94 CHRIST 

One may deny its truth if he will. Maybe 
it would be less unfortunate to have Christ's 
truth denied outright than to have its mean- 
ing evaporated into pietistic tropes and fig- 
ures. It is not surprising that that has 
been done. For if his revelation be taken 
for the face of it, it becomes, verily, a two- 
edged sword, piercing the joints and marrow 
of human life. Little wonder he declared 
that his way is narrow and his gate strait. 
It has proved so. It is easier to bedeck the 
gate with garlands and sit down outside 
than to struggle within. 

He deals with the stern realities of things. 
The imperious instinct of the individual is 
his lust of living ; his besetting defeat is that 
The instinct he must die. The Gospel of Christ is essen- 
ervation| eS ~ tially the exhibition of a way to turn defeat 
into victory. He exemplifies this way in 
terms drawn from living. It is now a com- 
monplace of knowledge that each form of 
living thing arises out of the form next be- 
low it. From the primordial slime life is 
built upward, each higher form being the 
scaffolding to support a farther advance, 
until is reached the final product which we 
call Man. But evolution at every stage de- 
mands fit material with which to work. 



JESUS CHRIST 95 

Jesus finds the material for the New Man 
in the nature of that one which now is. His 
estimate of the quality of human nature is 
shown by the use to which he puts it. He 
conceives of it not as " fallen," but as unde- 
veloped. The contempt with which a cer- 
tain theology has treated human nature is 
absolutely opposed to his fundamental prin- 
ciple. 

He begins by calling himself the " Son of The Son of 
Man." For what purpose could he use that 
phrase other than to identify himself abso- 
lutely with human nature ? His emphasis 
here was not superfluous, as time has shown. 
His project was to put human nature, in his 
own person, to the experimentum crucis. He 
was exploiting the capabilities of man to 
the uttermost, and it must be made clear 
that the experiment was being made with 
human nature in its actuality. 

" For the man most man works "best for man, 
Like God at Nazareth." 

The title which he assumed for himself can- 
not be regarded as a fanciful one, nor was it 
one by which he expressed his affectionate 
sympathy with man's mortal condition. It 
was because the force of his experiment 



96 CHRIST 

with human living would be broken if it 
failed to show itself a really human experi- 
ment. He called himself the Son of Man 
because he wished no mistake to be made 
about the matter. If his Way should prove 
successful for himself and reach its goal, it 
must be made plain that the path was open 
for any man to follow after him. That 
would be impossible unless it were in the 
deepest sense natural. 

With this principle in mind we are pre- 
pared to follow the career of the Son of Man 
Hisexperi- understandingly. We encounter him first 

with* human as a man amon g men, a man who lived at a 
nature. certain place, at a certain date, a man with 
senses, faculties, emotions, as other men, a 
man who had been a babe, a youth, a young 
man, and had grown in wisdom and stature, 
and in favor with God and men. In the full 
possession of his human faculties, sanely, 
soberly, deliberately, he chose the Way of 
Life which he believed would save his life 
from ultimate defeat by death, and would 
also lay open a path accessible anywhere 
to mortal feet. He chose that path not 
arbitrarily, but because it is the one to which 
the ideal of humanity pointed. He counted 
the cost, and paid it because it was worth 



JESUS CHRIST 97 

it. The cost was very great, but the com- 
pensation was immeasurable. It consisted, 
essentially, in opening wide the side of hu- 
man nature which looks toward God and 
good, and resolutely closing the side which 
gives toward selfishness and sin. This kind 
of life could only be lived, in the nature of 
the case, in the midst of what we call cir- 
cumstances. For a human life consists not 
alone of actions, but of reactions as well. 
A holy life cannot be lived apart. " The 
stern but bracing discipline of living " is 
defeated unless the soul be exposed to the 
facts of life. 

His career was not that of a Teacher, ex- His task was 
pounding truth, of a Physician, expounding 
the laws of health, of a Philanthropist, alle- 
viating the ills of life. His goal was to be 
reached, if at all, simply by living. Some of 
the onlookers voted him a madman, some 
an impostor, some a fanatic, some a prophet, 
and some said he was possessed of a devil. 
Nearly all were offended, and little wonder. 
If his way was right, their way was wrong. 
His mere presence irritated, disturbed the 
world's complacency, stultified the world's 
wisdom, jeopardized the world's arrange- 
ments. Finally he was put out of the way 



to live. 



98 



CHRIST 



Each stage 
upward 
leaves be- 
hind the 
goods of 
the preced- 
ing one. 



by practically unanimous consent on the 
ground that he was too disagreeable to be 
allowed to live. He was not surprised, for 
he said himself that his way would not re- 
veal itself to the wise and prudent, but unto 
babes. Those who had eyes could see. 
They who see that the path to life lies not 
through power but goodness, they who have 
the heart of a little child, are the heirs with 
him of his Kingdom. As for the others, he 
assures them with a fine pleasantry that 
" they have their reward." They get wiiat 
they work for, so all equities are satisfied. 
They choose rather to exploit the stage of 
being where they now are than move on. 
They make life fat and full and pleasant, 
and he does not gainsay them. He only 
reminds them that if they wish eternal 
life they must trade something of this life 
to purchase it withal. Anthropithecus must 
renounce the freedom of the forest to be- 
come primeval man ; " Adam " in turn must 
renounce Eden as the price of knowing good 
and evil ; and the children of Adam can 
enter the gate of the New Kingdom only 
without their accumulations. 

Only one thing could vindicate the choice 
of Jesus ; that was to pass alive through 



JESUS CHRIST 99 

death. But emerging thus triumphant, he jesusvindi- 
claims it to be a vindication of potential ^f^^ 3 ' 
humanity. It also is compassed within the 
career of the Son of Man, who "must be 
delivered into the hands of cruel men, and 
be crucified, and rise again." He did not 
pass out of the category of humanity even 
in his ultimate experience. 

The fleeting and perplexing glimpses of 
his transmortem life are few, and such as 
they are do not come within the forms 
of thought and speech which pertain to the 
present stage of human existence. We have His trans- 
no pictures of the imagination to conceive, S^e. 111 
or words to frame them in. But the record, 
meagre and conflicting as it is, shows at 
least this much — that he was still a man. 
The stream of his self-consciousness was not 
interrupted. He could still say, "remem- 
ber." And memory is the chain which binds 
into one the successive moments of human 
personality. The whole scheme is presented 
as one continuous human life, the same life 
throughout, the babe, the man, the Master, 
the accused, the convict, the crucified, the 
dead, the living. 

One may dismiss it all as incredible, but 

he must admit its consistency. Its effect 

.L.oi C. 



100 CHRIST 

was to "bring immortality to light." An 
unsuspected potentiality of human nature 
exhibited itself in the Son of Man. Once 
seen, it became plain enough. It was the 
perfect and symmetrical exhibition of a type 
of humanity which has, belike, been sporad- 
ically in the earth, lo, these many aeons. 
The just, who in all ages have lived by 
faith, are, in this new light, seen to have 
possessed a more persistent and prepotent 
being than even they were aware. But 
since the Light of the World has shone in 
this dark place men need no longer grope 
or feel with hesitating fingers for some path 
by which to elude the ancient Destroyer, 
for " death is swallowed up in victory " by 
the Son of Man. 



"Conjecture of the worker by the work; 
Is there strength there ? Enough ; intelligence ? 
Ample ; but goodness in a like degree ? 
Not to the human eye in the present state, 
An isocele deficient in the base. 
What lacks, then, of perfection fit for God 
But just the instance which this tale supplies 
Of love without a limit ? So is strength, 
So is intelligence ; let love be so, 
Unlimited in its self-sacrifice, 
Then is the tale true, and God shows complete. 
Beyond the tale, I reach into the dark, 
Feel what I cannot see, and still faith stands." 
— Browning, " The Ring and the Book." 



102 



CHAPTER V 

THE DIVINE CHRIST 

There is something strangely repellent 
in the conventional formularies which ex- 
press the Christian doctrine of the Divinity 
of Christ. The so-called Athanasian Creed The too 
may properly be taken for an example. It j^** ^' 
is true that it has never been officially orthodoxy, 
accepted by the Church, but it may be said 
that it is the habit of orthodoxy to esteem 
it the most complete statement of the doc- 
trine extant. If the Christian multitude 
refuse to receive it officially it is " on ac- 
count of the hardness of their hearts." 

"For the right faith is that our Lord Jesus 
Christ, the Son of God, is God and Man; 

"God, of the substance of the Father, begotten 
before all worlds ; and Man, of the substance of 
his Mother, born in the world; 

" Perfect God, and perfect Man ; of a reasonable 
soul and human flesh subsisting; 

" Equal to the Father as touching his Godhead ; 
and inferior to the Father as touching his Man- 
hood. 

103 



104 CHRIST 

"Who, although he be God and Man, yet he is 
not two but one Christ ; 

" One ; not by conversion of the Godhead into 
flesh ; but by taking the manhood into God ; 

" One altogether ; not by confusion of substance ; 
but by unity of person. 

"For as the reasonable soul and flesh is one 
man; so God and Man is one Christ." 

The secret of this repulsion is not hard to 
discover. It is not because the proposi- 
tions are not true. No doubt they are true 
enough. But lying behind them one feels a 
temper from which he will turn away if he 
can. If he has just been reading the Gos- 
pels, and comes from under their gracious 
spell to confront this simulacrum, he feels 
as one would to find himself unexpectedly 
in a room where a group of surgeons were 
dissecting the body of a dear friend whom 
he had seen alive the hour before. It deals 
with a dead Christ. The spirit which finds 
satisfaction in such work is akin to that 
which would "peep and botanize upon a 
mother's grave." It is as though the lover 
should make an inventory of his mistress's 
charms, as though one inscribed a Bertillon 
description for an epitaph upon a brother's 
tomb. It offends by its sheer cold-blooded 



THE DIVINE CHRIST 105 

inquisitiveness. Nor is that all. One's in- 
telligence shares in the offence to his rever- 
ence. For the terms of the formulary are unintei- 
not really presentable before the under- ^o^, 
standing. The mind which attempts to 
grasp them is eluded and irritated. One 
moment it sees, and the next moment it 
does not see. Opposed and incompatible 
concepts are presented alternately and simul- 
taneously, until thought, beaten back and 
forth like a shuttlecock, drops exhausted. 
The soul is offered an analysis when it asks 
a synthesis, a metaphysical formula when 
it demands a living Person. The Christo- 
logical literature of the Church is of vast 
extent, and ranges from the most exalted 
devotion down to the veriest trifling. But 
one rises from its study with a feeling of de- 
pression. He has been seeking the living 
among the dead ; he is not here. 

The purpose of this writing is something 
altogether different. I would, if possible, 
take the reasonable man by the hand and 
lead him into the Presence. If he find there 
mystery, and reality passing understanding, False and 
it is needful for him to recognize in it the tery. myS ~ 
same kind of mystery which he must always 
confront when he explores the arcana of 



106 



CHRIST 



The exhibi- 
tion of 
Divine 
Humanity. 



Nature or strives to know God. Men have 
no quarrel with mystery as such. They 
will pay little heed to Mr. Spencer when he 
warns them away from God as trespassers 
upon the grounds of the Unknowable. As 
little will they mind Mr. Balfour's assurance 
that they cannot know " things in them- 
selves." The naturalist and the psycholo- 
gist, as well as the man of affairs and the 
woman who loves, have learned long ago 
that every advancing step of knowledge or 
experience brings them into the presence of 
ever widening mystery. But what they 
rightly demand is to know that the mysteri- 
ous things are real things and not figments. 
Not otherwise may the Eternal Christ be 
approached. 

We have seen that one moiety of Christ's 
career was to exhibit the whole capacity of 
Humanity. To this end he was born and 
passed through the whole orbit of movement 
of a man, from the womb, through growth, 
through temptation, through death, through 
hell, into the new Humanity. The other 
half was to exhibit God. But according to 
him, the two processes coalesced and became 
essentially one. Whoever sees man in his 
completeness finds in him something divine ; 



THE DIVINE CHRIST 107 

whoever sees God finds in him something 
humane. This approchment of God and Man 
is the note of Christianity. Unless we 
assume that human nature and divine nature 
possess a common quality, it is useless to 
enter the region of religion at all. For only 
beings of the same kind can hold inter- 
course. A man can have no commerce with 
a stone ; a fish cannot speak with a bird ; 
only a god can hold converse with God. 
The Gospels assume this with a strange sim- 
plicity. The genealogy in St. Luke places 
Adam in the direct line of descent between 
God and Jesus. " Jesus, which was the son 
of . . . David, which was the son of . . . 
Abraham, which was the son of . . . Noah, 
which was the son of . . . Adam, which 
was the son of God." The stirps is the 
same throughout. 

The foundation-stones of Christianity are God and 
these two, — « God is Love ; " and, « Ye are ^ y a ^ g e ated 
the sons of God." The small extent to 
which they are believed to be true is amaz- 
ing. Judging from the everyday speech of 
men, the very opposite beliefs prevail. God 
is conceived of as essentially Power; and 
man a rather contemptible but vain being, 
in whose fortunes God is not necessarily con- 



108 CHRIST 

cerned in any other way than he is with the 
rest of his creation. Christ's God is his own 
father, and the father of all his human breth- 
ren. It is from this antecedent fact that 
the Incarnation emerges. It is not in any 
true sense a reasoned and planned transac- 
tion. It is the spontaneous and involuntary 
act of a parent. " Love finds a way ; " and 
love takes no account of cost. Christ looks 
upon men not as manikins created by a 
divine fiat, but as the fruit of God's loins. 
Their Father's love for them is inescapable 
by himself. His own content and his own 
completeness are bound with them. His 
fatherhood is not one of majesty but of real 
parentage. There is current a strange reluc- 
tance to think or speak of God as enduring 
pain. He is thought to be fitly conceived 
only as serene, impassible, unperturbed in 
his self-centred felicity. 

The God of our Lord and Saviour Jesus 
Christ is one who has borne the cross in his 
own heart since before the foundation of the 
The eternal world. Pain is the eternal concomitant of 
pamo o . j ov j n g Whosoever loves places himself 
within the power of the object of his affec- 
tion. His happiness is no longer in his own 
keeping. If the loved one suffer, he suffers ; 



THE DIVINE CHRIST 109 

if the love be unrequited, it becomes a tor- 
ment. Moreover, love is the inevitable prod- 
uct of relationships. In its purest possible 
form it is the affection of a parent for a 
child. The higher the nature of the parent 
the more inextinguishable the love. Among 
beasts parental affection is of brief duration, 
and vanishes away. Among men it lasts God can- 
long, but is not inexpugnable. If the parent hisoff-° Wn 
be absolutely good, as God, the love will be spring, 
deathless. No waywardness of the child, 
no deformity, no folly, and no crime can 
beat it off. The suggestion that the Parent 
would slay the child to regain his own peace 
or to safeguard his own justice, is one so 
wildly irrational that one can only stand 
amazed when he confronts it in theologic 
guise. Suppose the All-Father, by one stern 
sentence of doom to condemn and execute 
the rebellious and hateful race of men, what 
then ? Has God no memory ? Is the 
blessed power to forget one of his attri- 
butes ? And is love not made of the same 
stuff in all spheres of being ? The eternal 
Father may not execute his children, nor can 
he unget them. There remains therefore 
only to win their affection and bring them 
home. But Love has no power to compel. 



110 CHRIST 

This is a place where coercion can only- 
defeat itself. It can only open its arms, 
entreat, solicit, understand, and wait. 

Christ defines himself as at once the Son 
of Man and the Son of God. That is, the 
The two par- Ideal man recognizes both parents, begotten 
Christ. of his Father who is in heaven in the virgin 

womb of Humanity his mother. He opens 
his arms to both. We have already looked 
at the side of his life which binds him to his 
kinsmen on the Mother's side. How did he 
conceive of himself as related to his Father ? 
In the first place he boldly claimed for 
himself the family likeness. " He that seeth 
me seeth him that sent me." " He that 
seeth me seeth the Father." He claimed to 
have a direct and immediate commission 
from the Father to do certain things. " I 
know him ; for I am from him, and he hath 
sent me ; the Father hath not left me alone ; 
for I do always the things which please 
him. I came forth from the Father, and 
am come into the world ; again I leave the 
world and go to the Father." Many a man 
has been " conscious of a mission " in the 
world, but no enthusiast uses language like 
this. Indeed it is but the simple truth to say 
that his speech does not in any way give the 



THE DIVINE CHRIST 111 

impression of an enthusiast. There is a cer- 
tain serene sanity about him which is not 
easy to define, but which makes itself felt. 

Now, if it be true that he held a special 
commission from God to do a specific thing, 
when did he receive it, and where, and how? 
He himself does not say. For the most part 
he contents himself with asserting the fact. 
He says that he " came down from heaven "; From 
that he is " doing the work which his Father StocStot? 
gave him to finish " ; that he " seeks not his 
own will but the will of him that sent him " ; 
that he " came out from God." He claims 
to have a delegated power on earth to 
forgive sins. Once he claimed to be the 
" lord" of whom David spoke when he said, 
" Yahveh saith unto my lord, Sit thou on my 
right hand." And once in a cryptic utter- 
ance he seems to assert for himself a pre- 
existence, — "before Abraham was I am." 
This is as far as we can go depending upon 
his own statements. He believed himself to 
have a special commission from God ; he 
knew his Father's will beyond the possibil- 
ity of mistake ; he came out from the 
Father ; he expected to return again to 
the Father; and to come again to judge 
the quick and the dead ; and he acted as no 



112 



CHRIST 



" If thou be 
the Christ, 
tell us 
plainly." 



mere man has either the power or the right 
to act. 

We may acknowledge that this seems a 
meagre and unsatisfactory way for a divine 
personality to show himself withal. " If 
thou be the Christ, why not tell us 
plainly ? " It would seem to have been so 
easy for him to exhibit himself in some less 
questionable shape. But this objection can- 
not stand against even a very little sober 
reflection. Why does not God always show 
himself ? Why does he leave men to grope 
and hesitate, lost in the mazes of the uni- 
verse ? The answer is easy. Revelation is 
but the obverse of discovery. No truth is 
ever revealed to an intelligence except as 
it is discovered. The function of any 
reality is only to be; it is the task of in- 
telligence to see it. In the nature of things 
God, at any time or place or way, can only 
be found of them that seek. 



" ' Oh, where is the sea,' the fishes cried, 

As they swam the crystal clearness through ; 

1 We've heard from old of the ocean's tide, 
And we long to look on the waters blue. 

The wise ones speak of an infinite sea ; 

O who can tell us if such there be ? ' 

" The lark flew up in the morning bright, 
And sung and balanced on sunny wings ; 



THE DIVINE CHRIST 113 

And this was its song; ' 1 see the light ; 
I look on a world of beautiful things, 
But flying and singing everywhere, 
In vain have I searched to rind the air.' " 

The task of the disciples was to see the 
divinity, being in its presence. Did they 
see ? and what did they see ? The most 
exalted term used by them during his life 
was, " Thou art the Christ, the Son of the 
living God." This definition, if it be a Divinity of 
definition, he expressly approved. Now, eludes defi- 
what did they mean by it ? I do not ask, mtion. 
What do the words connote when we use 
them ? but, What did Peter at Caesarea 
mean by them ? The reply is, He did not 
know clearly what he meant. It is the 
language of deep emotion, reverence, adora- 
tion. In that mood the mind does not at- 
tempt to define. We always imagine Peter 
falling upon his knees before the Master 
while he made this impulsive speech. The 
very form of the declaration shows that 
he was controlled by emotion and not by 
thought. The terms used served well enough 
to express a feeling. And after all, the fact 
that Christ was able to arouse that feeling 
is a far better proof of his divine quality 
than it would have been to extract from his 



114 CHRIST 

followers the most scientific definition of 
himself. 

The terms used, " Christ " and " Son of 
God," were common in Jewish speech. But 
they were not used with any theological 
precision. They were simply titles for an 
exalted personage whose home was "in the 
heavens." In a way, " Messiah " was to 
the Jew very much the same thing that 
" Christ " is to the unthinking multitude 
among Christians, a high and divine being, 
somewhere between God and Man, but pre- 
cisely where they were not clear. 

At that stage the Christian conception of 
Christ stood for thirty years after his dis- 
appearance. His first ambassadors had no 
Disciples defined Christology. They were immedi- 
vagueChris- a tely concerned with his resurrection and 
toiogy. its practical results. As to the Person who 

had risen, they presented him under a vari- 
ety of terms, with the general purport that 
he was a divinely exalted person, but they 
did not identify him with God. Six weeks 
after the Resurrection, Peter, as the dele- 
gate of the apostolic band, for the first time 
preached Christ to the crowd. He intro- 
duces him as "a man approved of God 
unto you by mighty works and wonders 



THE DIVINE CHRIST 115 

which God did by him," as " the Holy 
One," " the Messiah." A little later, in his 
next address, he calls him " the Righteous 
One," "the Prince of Life," "the Servant Termsofthe 
Jesus whom God anointed," " a Prince and evangelists. 
Saviour." Stephen used words of like im- 
port. Paul in his great sermon at Athens, 
spoke only of " Jesus and the Resurrection." 
It is noteworthy that in that same sermon, 
when he w 7 as arguing with the Greeks about 
the real nature of God, as contrasted with 
their idols, he makes no mention of Christ 
at all. At this point they stood for many 
years. The fact was they felt no need for 
any more precise definition of the Christ. 
He possessed their worship wholly, and they 
were under a driving enthusiasm. Moreover, 
Christianity was at first deemed both by 
its friends and its enemies to be a movement 
within Judaism. The Christians were still 
Jews, and they had no thought of becoming 
anything else. Their aim was to " redeem 
Israel." They did not realize at all that 
Christ's relations were with the universal 
world. For the purpose in hand, the terms 
in which they presented him were quite suffi- 
cient. If they could convince the Hebrews 
of that much, their task would be done. 



116 CHKIST 

But when Christianity was driven to see 

that Judaism was too narrow for it, and was 

How to state led to confront the pagan world, the neces- 

the Christ to • > r 1 . j i i 

the pagan S1 v * or some more coherent and portable 
world. conception of Christ became evident. So 

long as they preached the " Messiah " to Jews 
they did not need to define the term ; but 
when they undertook to preach Christ to 
pagans, the first question which they must 
hear and answer was, " What is this 
Christ ? " At this point we once again meet 
St. Paul. We may say that to him we owe 
the Christ of Christendom. Not, of course, 
that he created the character, but taking the 
facts of the case he first saw their meaning 
and import. Nor need we say that he set 
forth their whole meaning. He was far too 
modest himself to claim that. The Incar- 
nation is a fact which belongs to the whole 
universe of men, and each generation may 
legitimately be expected to give some needed 
touch to its interpretation. That much mis- 
used phrase, " the faith once for all delivered 
to the saints," has no application here. The 
fond notion that the truth concerning Christ 
was completed and sealed at some uncertain 
date in the early centuries, is a dream of 
doctrinaires. The saints themselves with- 



THE DIVINE CHRIST 117 

out us are not perfect. But St. Paul began 
the task of presenting Christ to the intelli- 
gence. He had hardly died when another 
man took up the theme and carried it far 
beyond the point he reached, but so far as 
he did go, his work in the main stands 
to-day. 

Paul's first step was to disentangle Christ Christ 
from the Jewish Messiah. That conception, t he g M es _ an 
as we have seen, was both too narrow and siah - 
too incoherent to fit him. Paul declares that 
before he knew Christ, while he was a Jew, 
he did know the Jewish Messiah, " a Christ 
after the flesh," but " thereafter he knew him 
no more " (2 Cor. v. 16). He admits, of 
course, that Christ was that, but he points 
out that that was the smallest part of what 
he was. He makes but little of the concrete 
life of Jesus, in fact he seldom refers to it 
at all. " With the death of Jesus the former 
age became extinct. When he bowed his 
head upon Calvary, the Christ according to 
the flesh, i.e. the Jewish Messiah, died never 
to live again, and the age of the spiritual 
Messiah was ushered in. In dying he abdi- 
cated the Messiahship of a people and as- 
sumed the universal sceptre of mankind." 
Paul lifted the conception of Christ out of 



118 CHRIST 

history into cosmology. He identifies the 
risen Man with the nature of God. 

We need not pause here to estimate the 
credibility or even the rationality of this 
conception, but may well remind ourselves 
and others that it is the one which has been 
for more than nineteen centuries actually 
The effect of transforming human life. We may well be- 
tioninhis- lieve that its introduction at a critical point 
tory. £ history saved humanity from perishing 

from off the face of the earth through sheer 
moral rottenness. It arrested the attention 
of a melancholy world, given over to luxury 
and brutality, and made it consider whether 
after all human goodness might not have a 
divine sanction. Since then it has been con- 
sidering more and more. It is the belief in 
the Incarnation which in its final output 
builds asylums for abandoned babes, makes 
society uneasy at the cry of the oppressed, 
renders man's labor and woman's virtue 
worth while, subdues the material world to 
men's uses, because it believes that man is 
intrinsically worth doing it for. It is Chris- 
tianity and not " civilization " which carries 
Christendom forward. And Christianity is 
the Eternal Christ. 

Of all writers who have influenced the 



Christ. 



THE DIVINE CHRIST 119 

world's thought and life Paul is perhaps the 
most difficult to construe. He mingles dia- 
lectics, poetry, exhortation, and rhapsody as 
only untrained genius could do. He nowhere 
sets out in formal propositions his conception St. Paul's 
of Christ. But it is not difficult to gather 
from his undisputed Epistles his main idea. 
He depicts Christ as " the image and likeness 
of God " ; as the befng in whom is reflected 
" the light of the knowledge of the glory of 
God " ; the « Man from Heaven " ; the " life- 
giving Spirit " ; the " One without sin " ; the 
" One sent from God " ; as having been con- 
cerned with creation itself, " through whom 
are all things." But he always stops short 
of identifying him with the eternal God. 
Indeed in one crucial passage he shows 
plainly that he conceived him to be still, in 
the scale of being, separate from and subor- 
dinate to God. " I would have you to know 
that the head of the woman is the man ; and 
the head of every man is Christ ; and the 
head of Christ is God." In substance, he 
took the Hebrew-Christian " Messiah," broke 
it up, set free the Christ which they had con- 
cluded within it, and set him in the place of 
supreme honor, over all things in the uni- 
verse, but beneath God. 



120 CHRIST 

Both the authorship and the date of the 
Fourth Gospel are still in dispute. No one, 
however, will quarrel with the statement 
that it was written somewhere between 
fifty and a hundred years after the resurrec- 
The Christ tion of Christ. Nor does its authorship 
Fourth Gos- £ rea tly matter for the purpose in hand, — 
pel. though personally I find it difficult to feel 

much weight in the considerations which 
would deny for it the hand of " that disciple 
which Jesus loved." In any case the writer 
had before him the same facts which Paul 
had, and in addition thereto had Paul's 
interpretation of the facts. But John, if it 
be he, takes the facts and lifts them at once 
into the category of the Divine. At the 
very beginning of his Gospel he applies a 
new term to Christ. He calls him the 
a Word," the " Logos." " In the beginning 
was the Word, and the Word was with God, 
and the Word was God." What does he 
mean? At this point we meet a serious 
difficulty of a practical kind. The term 
"Logos," which in the New Testament is 
rendered " Word," is a term which cannot 
be expressed in English except by a clumsy 
and difficult circumlocution. It may be 
enough to say that the purpose of the writer 



CHRIST 121 

was by means of this term to identify Christ 
with the essence of God. This purpose 
controls throughout his Gospel. The later 
conception of two or more persons in the God- 
head, and the essential relations of these 
persons toward each other, does not seem to 
have been in his mind. It is true that he 
saw in the very nature of God a " Father " 
and a " Son," that he saw the Son going 
into the universe upon an errand of God, and 
there are intimations that he discerned a 
third spiritual personality concerned in the 
transaction, but beyond that he does not go. 
For any further development of the Doctrine 
of Christ we must go to the Church and not 
to the New Testament. 1 

And now, what is the substance of it all ? The sum of 
What but this, — In the career of Jesus is m atter? 6 
exhibited in actual experience both the ideal 

1 It seems proper for certain reasons to say that I have 
stopped in the argument before reaching the Doctrine of the 
Trinity, and have done so intentionally. I have stopped 
where the Catholic Creeds stop. I believe that the Doctrine 
of the Trinity, as it has been held by the sober mind of the 
Church since the third century, is true, and that it is an 
adequate philosophy of God so far as the wit of man can 
devise. But it must be borne in mind that the Doctrine 
exists for the purpose of making coherent the facts of the 
Incarnation. The Doctrine must be construed by the facts, 
and the facts may not be strained to fit the Doctrine. 



122 CHRIST 

life and possibility of man ; and also all of 
God which is expressible in terms of human- 
ity. The motive compelling the amazing 
phenomenon is that God is Love ; that he has 
begotten children ; that the children, being 
children, are wandering with aimless feet and 
perishing ; that the Son, the first-born among 
•many brethren, comes with the Father's ben- 
ediction to lead them home ; that his way 
leads through pain and death ; that in the 
radiance of his risen life some of the chil- 
dren at least — the Magdalene first of all — 
recognize him and cry Rabboni, which is to 
say, Master ! 

But all this has place in history. How- 
ever true and real, it is ten thousand miles 
away in space, and twenty centuries in time. 
When the Son of Man disappeared he left 
the disciples staring foolishly into the clouds. 
To reproduce the Judean scenes however 
vividly will not bring him back again. If 
he be really a person who has actual relations 
with human life, " who shall scale the heav- 
ens to bring him down, or descend into the 
The present abyss to bring him up from the dead ? " In 
situation. a worc [ j w h a t does Christ mean to the work- 
aday world ? Does he mean anything ? 
Neither science nor philosophy take any 



THE DIVINE CHRIST 123 

account of him at all. For their purposes 
he is superfluous. One can conceive the 
universe fashioned by a Creator, managed 
by a Creator, and finally destroyed by a 
Creator, and their philosophy is complete, — 
provided the Creator be without love. 
Science may be conceived so exhaustive that 
no phenomenon is left unclassified, — pro- 
vided it leave the religious faculty of man 
out of account. But these two things, God's 
love and man's yearning, are eternal disturb- 
ers of the peace. Is there any place or any 
person in which these two needs may meet, 
under the conditions of the universe as they 
now exist ? 

The Christ of Theology is a marvellous The Christ 
construction. No one would even wish to 
belittle it, or to feel anything but reverence 
for the devotion and the thought out of 
which it has been created. But one cannot 
shut his eyes to the fact that the world has 
grown indifferent to it. The images under 
which that Christ is presented to the intelli- 
gence have come to appear artificial and un- 
real. It does not satisfy to be told that he 
is an eternal High Priest and an eternal 
Victim forever pleading his pain before an 
eternal God. The very conception itself has 



124 CHRIST 

passed away from among the stock of men- 
tal forms with which thought is equipped. 
Even when the image is vividly realized it 
presents a mode of action in some far-away 
sphere. The difficulty is to connect it in 
any real way with human living. It only 
maintains for itself a place in human speech 
by the iteration of its terms in connection 
with a Sacrament, whose real significance is 
obscured by the terms. Even so, one never 
meets it outside this sacramental region. 
Rightly or wrongly, it does not present a 
being having actual relations with life. 
Royal im- Nor do the honorific attributes of a King 

not serveus. ^ rm g us nearer. « Sitting at the right hand " 
of a Potentate had a significance for the 
oriental, with his innate habit of royalty. 
But for us it is not so. Not that the con- 
ception is untrue, it is an image which Jesus 
used to express himself. No doubt it con- 
veyed to his hearers the impression which 
he meant it to convey, but it did so because 
of the preconceptions which they brought 
to it. But even so, it conveys the idea of 
an external Monarch and Ruler, constraining 
history and bending human events to his 
purposes. That Christ has been and is doing 
this is plain to one who takes any large view 



THE DIVINE CHRIST 125 

of the movement of the world. But what 
we seek to find, if it be possible, is how he 
is related to the individual life. We ask 
not to know completely what he is, or how 
he acts, but how to reach him. 

No more true or more profound statement 
of the truth will be made than that by St. 
John, — « The Word was with God ; the is the incar- 
Word was God ; the Word was made flesh." ™^n g 
The function of the " Word " is to mediate phenome- 
between the self-consciousness of God and 
the self-consciousness of man. That is only 
possible by in some way coalescing these 
two in one self-conscious person. This we 
believe to have been done in the person of 
Christ. But, and I speak it reverently, has 
it stayed done ? Was the Incarnation a 
mere episode in the movement of God and 
Humanity ? Or is it an abiding fact ? And 
if it be the latter, in what region does that 
reality now function ? We here touch that 
fascinating and perplexing question of the 
relation of the Risen Christ to the actual 
universe. It is clear from the record that 
he, in his " spiritual body," had some point 
or mode of contact with what we call the 
physical universe ; and also that his psychi- 
cal part was such as could hold converse 



126 CHRIST 

with the psychical part of men. Do both 
of these phenomena still obtain ? If not, 
has the Incarnation come to an end ? The 
way is thus opened to say, as I believe with 
reverence, though with hesitation, what 
follows. 

The two most striking and significant 
achievements of knowledge thus far reached 
are those two which open at the same time 
Unsuspected hitherto unsuspected doors into the physical 
the physical anc ^ psychical worlds. The unthinking per- 
sphere. son i s prone to regard such things as Roent- 
gen Rays and Radial Activity to be merely 
inventions and discoveries, only a little more 
wonderful in degree than the hundreds which 
have preceded them. This misapprehends 
their significance. They are discoveries in 
a new region. They have compelled a new 
definition of "flesh." They may compel a 
new reading of the Incarnation ; for that, on 
one side, is a material phenomenon. 

The other is the discovery of what is 
commonly called the " Subconscious Self." 
Underlying, or behind the conscious self of 
each individual is a deeper and unknown 
self. As Professor James says, " this sub- 
conscious self is now a well accredited 
entity." From it those experiences and 



THE DIVINE CHRIST 127 

emotions which we call religious well up into 
consciousness. Their invasions have to do 
with prayer, conversion, religious experience, 
as well as a thousand other things in our liv- 
ing. It is no doubt here that the conception 
takes place which, after gestation, issues in 
the " new birth." As Professor James again 
profoundly says, the "religious question is 
primarily a question of life ; of living or 
not living in the higher union which opens 
itself to us as a gift." 

May it be, therefore, that the real Being 
toward which the " new born " soul feels is 
the One whom St. John describes as the The path- 
Word made Flesh ? that no one ever has or y^g 
ever can see the Father save the Son and he Chri st. 
to whom the Son reveals him ? that the sac- 
ramental notions of being born again, and 
having the body and the soul preserved by 
Him to everlasting life, may after all be 
scientific and not mystical terms ? and that 
" the heavenlies " in which He dwells may 
not be remote or inaccessible ? In a word, 
is it not possible that the shortest and most 
accessible path to the glorified Christ may 
turn out to be through the new-found 
capacities of physical rather than meta- 
physical phenomena ? Suppose the devout 



128 CHRIST 

soul, which has stood gazing vacantly into 
the heavens, shall turn about and look in- 
ward and downward through its subcon- 
scious self, and move outward through its 
own spiritual body, may it not find itself 
face to face with the Word made Flesh ? 
And in point of fact, is not that the only 
way by which any soul has ever caught any 
glimpse of divine realities ? 



" There is in man the spark of the Divine nature. 
We know this because we see it in Jesus. But we 
cannot of ourselves or through our own power grow 
into full consciousness of the Divine element within 
us. The spark of Divine fire is too feeble in our 
spirit. This muddy vesture of decay which doth 
grossly close us in clings too close and impedes our 
effort too effectually. Our one and only hope lies 
in the intensity of the belief that this can be done 
in spite of the impossibility; that the Divine ele- 
ment in us can overcome the lower nature and as- 
sert itself in victory, though we ourselves cannot 
succeed. The good man is he who has tried hard to 
achieve even a little progress on the way to good- 
ness ; he is made good because he has tried. And 
the guarantee that all good things are ours lies in 
that one supreme truth — the Life of Christ." 
— Bamsey, " The Education of Christ." 

" Fate, which foresaw 
How frivolous a baby man would be, 
By what distractions he would be possessed, 
How he would pour himself in every strife, 
And well-nigh change his own identity ; 
That it might keep from his capricious play 
His genuine self, and force him to obey 
Even in his own despite his being's law, 
Bade through the deep recesses of our breast 
The unregarded river of our life 
Pursue with indiscernible flow its way; 
And that we should not see 
The buried stream, and seem to be 
Eddying at large in blind uncertainty, 
Though driving on with it eternally." 

— Matthew Arnold. 



130 



CHAPTER VI 

THE CHRISTIAN MAN 

It is remarkable that the images by which images he 
Christianity is usually pictured are just the u °g S E 
ones which Jesus never used. He likens the 
Kingdom of Heaven to many things, but 
never to a State, a City, or an Army. Its 
actual phenomena are incongruous with all 
these things. The most fatal error of all has 
been in identifying his idea of a " Kingdom " 
with the phenomena of a State. In its polit- 
ical sense the idea of a Kingdom is very famil- 
iar. Its component elements are a definite 
territory, a sovereign, citizens, terms of nat- 
uralization, a code of laws, provision against 
foreign attack, penalties provided for breach 
of order. Under this guise the Kingdom of 
Christ in the world is habitually presented. 
The wonder is that men have not always 
realized how utterly inapplicable these con- 
ceptions are to the facts of the case. 

For a kingdom of that sort must have defi- 
nite and recognizable frontiers, one must be 

131 



132 CHRIST 

Nature of a able to tell whether he is within it or not; 

state!* ne mus t be able to tell where it begins and 
ends. Just in proportion as this conception 
has controlled the life of the Christian Soci- 
ety, that Society has lost sight of the truth 
of Christ. The conspicuous example of this 
policy is that organization calling itself the 
Catholic Church, and known by others as 
the Church of Rome. This conception of 
an empire is its organizing principle. On 
this account it was actually transformed 
long ago from a Church to a State. It pos- 
tulates a territory conterminous with the 
earth. It places a Vicegerent of God in the 
throne of the sovereign. It prescribes defi- 
nite conditions of citizenship. It has a code, 
with penalties for its infraction. They who 
are within this kingdom are Christians ; they 
who are outside are not. The system is sim- 
ple, coherent, intelligible. In the Protestant 
world the same political conception of a 
kingdom obtains, but it is rested upon 
uneasily, and practically is evaded. It pre- 
fers to content itself with the figment of 
a " Church Invisible " rather than to carry 
its political notion of the kingdom into 
practice. The Catholic, therefore, has a 
mistaken answer ready for the question, 



THE CHRISTIAN MAN 133 

What is a Christian ? the Protestant has 
no answer. 

The fundamental error is in construing 
Christ's " Kingdom " in political images. 
What he deals with is a biological King- 
dom, not a political State. When this is 
recognized, it at once removes the matter 
into an entirely different region. Concep- 
tions drawn from the realm of governments, 
laws, statutes, and institutions are irrele- 
vant. At most, they can only be rightly 
used to illustrate or help out the thought. 
But they are the metaphors ; the biological 
concepts are the facts, and not the reverse. 
The problem is one essentially akin to that Nature of a 
of the naturalist. It is to identify, examine, d ™ g ng " 
describe, and classify a new creature. The 
final task of the naturalist is always classifi- 
cation. Where does any given form belong 
in the order of life ? In what does it differ 
from other creatures ? If it be true that 
Christ stands in the centre of a new Order of 
beings, how are the members of that King- 
dom to be recognized ? How do they act ? 
What are their habits ? In a word, What 
is a Christian ? 

The adjective " Christian " is really one of 
the most vague and indefinite words in com- 



134 CHRIST 

mon use. The definitions of it which have 
been attempted are as a rule either so con- 
fused as to be valueless, or so precise as to 
what is a be untrue. Is a Christian simply one who 
ns ian j g mora ]iy « "better " than other men ? Or is 
he one who proposes to form his life after 
the pattern of Jesus ? Or is he one who has 
been admitted to membership in the Organi- 
zation by the due rite of initiation ? Or is 
he one who has passed through some special 
phase of emotional experience ? Or is he 
the product of some combination of any or 
all of these ? The answer is, All these defi- 
nitions are irrelevant. They are like at- 
tempts to express a chemical compound in 
feet and inches, to describe a polyp or a 
marsupial in musical notation, to measure 
a mother's sympathy by a qualitative analy- 
sis of her tears, or to describe a human child 
in terms of geometry. The phenomena exist 
in one realm ; the definitions are drawn from 
another. If, however, we replace the whole 
matter in the region where Christ's facts 
move, the perplexity disappears. 
How shall The practical evil wrought by this con- 

about to be f us i° n is incalculable. Men actually do not 
bom again? know how to set about the matter. Their 
action in the sphere of religion shows a 



THE CHRISTIAN MAN 135 

strange lack of purpose or plan. In other 
things they know what they are trying to 
do ; here they are vague, and as a conse- 
quence, ineffective. Very many leave it 
alone altogether on this veiy account. It 
is probably the case that religion occupies 
a far smaller space in the everyday lives of 
men within Christendom than it does in hea- 
then men's lives. The Moslem or the Hin- Confused 
doo allows to it a large measure of activity. Christianity. 
This is not because he is more religious than 
we, but because religious action is for him 
more clearly defined. His course of action 
is clear, and is followed chiefly because it is 
clear. Among us it is not so. Multitudes 
of men are held away from Christianity a 
thousand times more by its illusiveness 
than by its mystery or its moral exaction. 
" What shall I do to inherit eternal life ? " 
is the eternal cry of the earnest soul. But 
to this eager inquiry there is no answer 
forthcoming which he sees how to act upon. 
Jesus' answer seems to have been strangely 
lost sight of. What that is we shall exam- 
ine after a little. But in its absence, and 
no doubt on that account, what we see 
about us is a curious lack of stability and 
fixedness of purpose in religious movement. 



136 



CHRIST 



Properties 
of a King- 
dom in 
Nature. 



It is not at all " inconsistency," that is, lack 
of correspondence between profession and 
practice. It is action which is without 
clear aim, movement which goes nowhere. 
The practical man either leaves it out of his 
life, or else he tends continually to move 
either toward the mechanical legalism of 
Rome at her worst, or toward practically 
unethical Revivalism. He rests finally upon 
a Code, or an Emotion, or he oscillates 
between the two. 

A " Kingdom " in Nature is a very com- 
plex and mysterious thing, but its phenomena 
are intelligible. Let us take, for example, the 
" Animal Kingdom." Its frontiers are not 
discoverable. Between it and the vegetable 
Kingdom next below there is a debatable 
land, how extended no man knows. There 
are a myriad forms of life, as yet too little 
developed to permit one to say which King- 
dom they belong to. The Kingdom contains 
within its borders forms as widely unlike 
in manner and appearance as the Amoeba 
and the Man, together with all forms be- 
tween. The quality which all the forms 
possess in common is that thing which we 
call animal life. It contains within it a 
thousand methods of generation, but the 



Nature. 



THE CHRISTIAN MAN 137 

thing generated is always of the same kind 
— a living, animal form. Its most highly 
organized product is Humanity. But within 
that form also there is immeasurable diver- 
sity. It contains individuals hardly distin- Evolution in 
guishable from the brute beneath it, to the 
most highly developed individual living. 
Within this Kingdom there is an eternal 
onflow and progress. At a certain point 
the Vertebrate emerges ; at another, Marsu- 
pials, Mammalia, Primates, Man. While it 
is evident that each form begins in the ones 
below it, its origin cannot be traced. It 
was not; it is. Whenever it is, it becomes 
identifiable. The Christian Princijpia is that 
the origins of a still higher type of life lie 
latent in Humanity ; that they develop ac- 
cording to a law of their own ; that Christ 
is organically connected with this process of 
development ; and that the new creature is 
the Christian. Is it possible, then, to ascer- 
tain what is the distinguishing quality of 
this new creature ? 

There is one significant fact which the 
naturalist has learned in studying the evo- 
lution of species. That is, a new form does 
not take its start from the summit of the 
form next below. The divergent path which 



138 



CHRIST 



Origin of 
the Chris- 
tian in the 
man. 



A new kind 
of being. 



issues in a higher being takes its departure 
at a point away below that place. The line 
of evolution which culminates in Man, when 
traced backward, is found to intersect the 
trunk of the tree of life at a point much be- 
low the place from which the Simian branch 
springs. By analogy, therefore, we must not 
look for the beginnings of the " new life " at 
the top of human attainment. It must be 
sought for among meek and lowly beginnings. 
We may expect it to be present at a stage 
where the intelligence is but little developed, 
where all human powers and faculties are 
relatively low. " For not many wise, not 
many noble, not many mighty are chosen, but 
God hath chosen the foolish and the weak 
things of the world to put to shame the 
things that are strong." And Jesus an- 
nounces that "God hath hid these things 
from the wise and understanding, and hath 
revealed them unto babes." 

Whatever "that manner of life which 
was also in Jesus Christ " may prove to be, 
we may expect to find it compatible with a 
low order of intellectual and moral develop- 
ment. To identify the " Christian " we must 
not look for a higher life than that which 
Humanity has already exhibited, but for a 



THE CHRISTIAN MAN 139 

different type of life. The disciples of Christ 
were not " better " men than their contem- 
poraries : they had become a different kind 
of men. They probably compared but illy 
with Seneca or Marcus Aurelius or the 
" sweet Gallio." They were men of limited 
intelligence and faulty character. This 
feature is strikingly true of Christianity so 
far as its history is contained within the 
New Testament. St. Paul addresses the 
Christians as " saints," " new creatures," and 
in the same breath chides them for their 
flagrant moral offences. He deplores that 
they are but new-born babes in the new 
Order, and can only be fed with milk and - 
not strong meat. All that the new life de- 
mands is a human life developed far enough 
to make its beginning possible. 

The New Life attaches itself to human 
nature at the point where the moral sense 
emerges into self-consciousness. In its es- 
sence it is un-self-ishness. On its theoretical 
side it is not likely to be more adequately 
stated than has been done by Schopenhauer. 
In the natural man the soul is divided be- Thewmto 
tween the "Will to Live," and the "Will to J^wmto 
Love." Led by the one the individual strives L °ve. 
to conquer the universe to its own ends. It 



140 CHRIST 

looks toward itself, and must ultimately be 
defeated and perish, because the universe is 
hostile to it, and is too strong for it. Led 
by the other, it emerges from itself, becomes 
at home in the universe, and akin to God. 
The first self-consciousness of this kinship is 
the " new birth." Like all new-born things 
it is feeble and its motions are reflexive 
rather than voluntary, but it has been born. 
It feels outward with hesitating fingers, not 
to clutch the universe, but to caress it. 
But, it will be asked, Is not this true of 
every man ? I reply, yes and no. Every 
man does have the capacity to love, to 
love furiously, but his love is the lust to 
possess and enjoy. It is the higher and 
rarer man who loves without reference to 
self. If it be asked, Does any man do that ? 
I answer, Yes, the New Man does, and this 
St. John's is the test by which he is identified. The 
classic defi- c ] ass ^ c statement of the truth is in the First 

mtion. 

Epistle of St. John, which is hereby com- 
mended to the scientific man. No more 
profound utterance is extant in philosophy 
or biology : — 

" The Word of life was manifested, and 
we have seen and bear witness unto you the 
eternal life which was with the Father and 



THE CHRISTIAN MAN 141 

was manifested unto us. That which we 
have seen and heard we declare unto you, 
that ye also may have fellowship with us 
whose fellowship is w r ith the Father and 
with his son Jesus Christ. A new com- 
mandment write I unto you, which is no 
new commandment, that ye love one an- 
other. For love is of God, and every one 
that loveth is begotten of God, and knoweth 
God. He that loveth not knoweth not God. 
And the witness is this, that God gave unto 
us the eternal life, and this life is in his 
Son. He that hath the < Son ' hath the life ; 
he that hath not the < Son ' hath not the 
life. These things have I written unto you 
that ye might know r that ye have the eter- 
nal life." 

The " Christian," then, is the human being 
who is recognized by his peculiar habit, 
viz. his will to live being subordinated to 
his will to love. This sets him in a new 
relation to both the spiritual and the physi- 
cal universe. 

But if this be the state of the case, were 
there not Christians long before Christ, and christians 
in regions where no word of him has ever Christ 
reached ? Undoubtedly. The place held 
by Christ in the New Order is not the 



142 CHRIST 

beginning of a series, but the centre of a 
circle. From Jerusalem he moves outward 
in every direction, not only in space but in 
time as well. If life be correlated organi- 
cally with the Son of Man whom we adore, 
it must be in some way which is superior to 
times and dates, and which is not contingent 
upon human missionaries. We are not at 
liberty to present him as eternal, and at the 
same time fixed within history and geogra- 
phy. The New Man must have appeared in 
the upward progress of humanity long before 
God's experiment with human living in the 
time of Tiberius Caesar. We may not allow 
the need of theological coherence to shut the 
doors of the Kingdom against " Noah, Dan- 
iel, and Job," or their kind of any kin. The 
" God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob " is not 
the God of the dead, but of the living. The 
Christian contention is that whoever, any- 
where, or at any time, has attained to a 
spiritual life which manifests these qualities, 
has attained unto that life whose law is ex- 
posed and exemplified by him " of whom 
the whole family in heaven and earth is 
called." 

There is another and a perplexing aspect 
of our theme which we may not evade. 



THE CHRISTIAN MAN 143 

The New Man, whom we have been trying what of the 
to identify and describe, exists actually in r udimen° 
such rudimentary and incomplete shape, and tary forms? 
passes out of this life so far from complete. 
" Some are sick and weakly among us, and 
some are asleep." What of these ? What 
of the undeveloped child, the feeble-minded 
and the feeble-souled, that great multitude 
who, so far as we can see, have been born 
from above, have the " will to love," but 
have been so let and hindered in the race 
set before them that they must needs pass 
on, if they pass at all, into the next phase, 
like Richard the hunchback complained he 
had been thrust into this, " scarce half made 
up " ? Frankly speaking, I do not believe 
this difficulty would ever have been felt 
except for the presence of a meagre and 
poverty-stricken conception of existence to 
which an unworthy theology has given cur- 
rency. It, without any warrant of God 
or Holy Scripture or the reasonableness of 
things, concludes the w T hole movement of 
the universe within the compass of two sta- 
dia, "this life" and "next life." Then it 
assumes that this one is the period of "pro- 
bation," within which the destiny of every 
living thing is wrought out and fixed. No 



144 



CHRIST 



No life any- 
where with- 
out move- 
ment. 



conceivable interest is served by this narrow 
and artificial scheme of things except that 
of logical definition. The New Testament 
has no such constricted outlook. It deals 
with realities and not systems, and takes 
little thought of " consistency." Existence 
is far too large a thing to be seen consist- 
ently. The general conception of the New 
Testament is, that the new life in the indi- 
vidual is begun here, and that he passes on, 
incomplete, into an existence where the same 
laws of being operate as do throughout time 
and space. 

There can be no life anywhere without 
movement, progress. Arrest means disin- 
tegration. It is true that this life is a pe- 
riod of " probation " for all living things ; 
but it is because life is alwa3 T s and every- 
where " under probation." That is to say, 
it endures so long as it conforms itself to 
the environing conditions. That necessity 
must hold good for the "next" life, or the 
next, or the next, or for as many as may be. 
By what warrant may we confine the suc- 
cessive phases of being to two, or to any 
other number ? We are concerned now 
only with the transit from this one that 
now is to the succeeding one, but we can 



THE CHRISTIAN MAN 145 

only think of the individual form as passing 
on into actual development and real vicissi- 
tude. Jesus is bold to make even Dives de- 
velop morally under the scorching discipline The disci- 
of hell. He became there a better man. nJxtiife. 
He reached the point where he could take 
thought of his brethren, about whom he had 
not concerned himself before. When the 
Christian seer calls the bederoll of the 
Saints who have won the life to come, he 
declares that " God hath provided that they 
without us should not be made perfect." 
Even the souls of the "saints under the 
altar " are morally lacking the while they 
cry to God for vengeance upon their perse- 
cutors. The next life must be a real life, for 
real persons, with real experience, or else be 
dismissed as " the work of a fever and the 
delirium of a dream." Human life without 
moral movement is inconceivable at any 
stage. It is the law of its being. Where in 
any case the new life is vigorous and stable 
enough to persist at all, its rudimentary, 
feeble, and imperfect forms cannot but 
move in that direction which is determined 
by their nature and their choice. Jesus 
himself forestalled the difficulty when in 
the Parable of the husbandman he bids the 



tian in life. 



146 CHRIST 

reapers " let both grow together until the 
harvest." They are not mature enough yet 
to be classified. The harvest is 

" That far-off, divine event, 
Toward which the whole creation moves." 

The practical question is a narrower, 
though may be not much less difficult one. 
The Chris- What is the essential note of the Christian 
in the world in which we actually live ? 
The opprobrium of Christianity has always 
been the Christians. May it be that phe- 
nomena have been looked for in them which 
in their nature is not theirs ? The function 
of the individual Christian in human society 
has been variously conceived. Is his task 
to be a model for human conduct ? To be 
an active reformer of manners ? To be a 
herald of new truth ? He has been praised 
and denounced equally for taking and for 
refusing these roles. Shall we follow the 
ascetic and say that the " religious " is 
ideally the man who separates himself from 
men, and lives by rule ? Shall we hearken 
to Tolstoi and strip ourselves of property, 
resent no injury, abjure courts of justice, 
refuse to bear a sword ? Shall we follow 
the beckoning finger of the sociologist into 



THE CHRISTIAN MAN 147 

the study of life with a view of bettering 
its conditions? Shall we join the philan- 
thropist to distribute bread and provide 
games ? The answer is, All these things 
we may or may not do, as the case may be. 
Christianity is compatible with the doing or 
not doing of any of them, but these things 
are not Christianity. 

The Christian is the soul that wills to The stem- 
love. But Love is an affection strong and nesso ve * 
wise as well as tender. It may be well for 
the Christian man to " sell all that he hath 
and give to the poor"; or it may be well 
for him to trade with his ten talents and 
gain ten other talents. He may not allow 
his love to lead him to do mischief. Here 
may be a community of poor, living squal- 
idly, lacking bread, crowded together and 
half-sheltered, naked, - sick, and cold. In 
their midst lives one of Christ's family who 
is rich. But suppose that community have 
no moral right to be there at all ? Allow 
that it is collected and held together by 
lust, greed, indolence, selfish thriftlessness ? 
Grant that nothing short of the hard stress 
of hunger and the discipline of cold will 
bring it to a better mind. What course of 
action will love point out to the Christian ? 



Feeble con- 



148 CHRIST 

I mean real love, the love that is solicitous, 
that wills good and not pleasure, the love 
which is strong enough to bear its own 
anguish rather than find relief in opening 
its hand in largesse. And in what does this 
ceptkms of situation differ from that of the Son of Man, 
richly endowed with the power to heal and 
relieve, and surrounded by a world full of 
sick, palsied, suffering, and naked ? " Love 
finds a way ; " but it must be the way which 
love illuminates. For Christianity to follow 
the feeble and essentially selfish way of Tol- 
stoi and his kind would be to transform it 
from a world force into a transient make- 
shift. It may well be that the peril most 
imminent to Christianity to-day is to sub- 
mit itself to the domination of a soft affec- 
tion, like that of a fond and foolish mother 
for a spoiled and exacting child. The law 
of the Christian's being is indeed to love, 
even his enemies ; to bless, even his perse- 
cutors ; but it must be with a good which 
works good and not harm to the enem}^, and 
a blessing which blesses them that work 
him evil. It is no paradox that the whole 
vocabulary of stern denunciation and judg- 
ment current in religious speech was coined 
by Jesus, and that its motive was his un- 



love. 



THE CHRISTIAN MAN 149 

bounded love. His " woe unto you " is as 
much part of his message as his " blessed 
are ye." 

Nor may the Christian put aside the sword Dynamic 
when that is the weapon to which love 
points. The Puritans had a fine phrase for 
the character which they held in honor, " He 
was faithful even unto slaying." The an- 
gelic message was "peace to men of good 
will " ; not a soft and undiscriminating peace 
to men who deliberately will ill. Here 
again the peril to Christianity may be not 
so much from those who too eagerly thrust 
the sword into its hand as from those who 
cry peace, peace, when there is no peace. 
There is evil in the world which is to be 
conquered and exorcized by gentleness ; but 
there is also evil which is to be driven down 
a steep place and choked in the sea. The 
Christian law is to love one's neighbor as 
himself ; neither less nor more. But is one 
not bound to discipline himself, with stripes 
if need be ? If it be better for him to cut 
off his right hand or pluck out his right eye 
if it cause him to offend, shall love for him- 
self hinder him ? Shall love forbid him to 
do so much for his brother ? The wide- 
spread delusion which prevails in our time, 



150 CHRIST 

the distress which many are suffering who 
would do the Master's will could they but 
see the way, rises out of a confusion of 
The law of thought. The law of the new Kingdom is 
dom foTthe f° r them that are within the Kingdom. 
Kingdom. There it can operate safely, and with incal- 
culable potency. But it is not the law of 
the "kingdoms of the earth." If it be at- 
tempted to apply it prematurely, or in a 
sphere where the spirit which is its dynamic 
is absent, it becomes the feeble and artifi- 
cial rule of doctrinaires. The New Order of 
man comes up, lives, and multiplies like the 
old. That one made its appearance on earth 
amid " the dragons weltering in the prime." 
He struggled for existence according to the 
laws of his own nature ; but he did not 
essay to bring the dragons under his law. 
The kingdoms of the earth are not yet the 
kingdoms of the Lord and of his Christ. 
" His method was the successive winning of 
separate souls, now an Andrew, now a Peter, 
now a Philip, until he had discovered and 
won to himself a few men and women fitted 
to herald and inaugurate a higher and more 
perfect social life." 

It is no doubt true, as is often objected, 
that good men will not of necessity make a 



THE CHRISTIAN MAN 151 

good society. But it is not true of the kind Do good men 
of good men that Christ begets. A com- society? g 
munity of that kind could be nothing else 
but good, for the controlling quality in each 
individual is that will to love which is the 
very bond of all virtues. In any case, 
Christ's policy is plain. The law of the 
Kingdom is not to be promulgated prema- 
turely, nor is it to be expected to function 
where the conditions are not present. His 
folk are counselled to be wise as serpents 
as well as harmless as doves. If they be 
wise, they will not attempt to " restore the 
kingdom to Israel " at this time or any other. 
They will live their own immortal lives, 
and quicken ever new lives into their own 
by contact of life with life. They are to be 
the salt of the world. The use of salt is 
not for shining and arid blocks to build 
temples and state houses withal. It does 
its work by disappearing in the mass to 
sweeten it. It is leaven, a single cell of 
which starts a fermentation where it touches. 
Its manner of life is not that of the lump 
in which it works, but its own. When its 
function is completed, it finds that it has 
done its work by dying. 

This also is the judgment of the great, 



152 CHRIST 

The wise wise world upon the matter. When the 
judgment, impatient Christian who would hasten the 
Kingdom enters the region of political action, 
or social order, or economic arrangements, 
the world looks after him with a smile, or a 
shrug, or a malediction, as the case may be. 
Its accurate instinct tells it that this is not 
his sphere of action. Its hoarded experi- 
ence, moreover, tells it that mischief may 
come of it. A Christian Socialism, Christian 
Economics, Christian Education, are phrases 
which will not bear analysis. If one should 
speak of Christian Chemistry or Christian 
Mathematics, the confusion involved would 
be obvious, but it exists in the other phrases 
none the less. Christian men have indeed 
to do with the activities of life, and must 
needs go into every region of it. But they 
do not go for the purpose of overturning the 
laws which obtain in those regions. Wher- 
ever they go, they meet beings of their own 
kind, and they transform others into their 
own likeness by vital contact. There is a 
free masonry of the spirit which does not ex- 
hibit the work of its lodge in the market 
place or the legislature. When his friends 
would have " taken Jesus by force and com- 
pelled him to be a king " he departed and 



THE CHRISTIAN MAN 153 

hid himself. The type of the Christian man 
is Jesus. If one can get free from the mis- 
conceptions which blind him, he will see the 
marvellous simplicity of that life. He chose TheChris- 
a way of life which could be trusted. He 
set out neither to seek a cross for himself, 
nor to readjust the world's confusion. He 
went not a single step out of his path to 
find a pang of body or soul. Such hurts as 
might be avoided without missing his pur- 
pose were avoided. He met the cross be- 
cause it stood in his path. He neither 
sought nor shunned it. Nor did he meddle 
in any way with institutions or collective 
terms of evil. Intemperance, cruelty, slav- 
ery, injustice, infanticide, and divorce were 
all about him. They flourish as vigorously 
yet in heathennesse. Within Christendom 
he and his kind have reduced them, and ex- 
pect to eradicate them. But what success 
has been achieved has been by his method. 
The organizers of reforms and secretaries 
of societies have their work to do, and where 
their w T ork is most efficient is where their 
personnel is most Christian, but after all it 
remains true that " the Kingdom of Heaven 
cometh not with observation." The re- 
generating force in human society has been 



154 CHRIST 

and is that innumerable company of un- 
known men and women who have been 
transformed in the image and likeness of 
Christ, who do not cry nor lift up their 
voices in the street, but quicken the world 
by simply living their new life. Outwardly 
they look and act much as other men ; but 
essentially they are new creatures. 



" The Christian seed is never sown in a neutral 
and empty soil. No soul, no social state, is a 
tabula rasa. The place is always occupied by 
anterior traditions of ideas, rites, or customs, by 
institutions in possession. Christianity cannot, 
therefore, root itself anywhere without entering 
into conflict with the regnant powers, without 
giving battle to prejudices, manners, and super- 
stitions, which naturally resist, and which, being 
conquered, spring up again within the conquer- 
ing religion. What shall we say of the Catholic 
Church after Constantine ? Is it not true that in 
the religious transformation at that time effected 
there was a double and mutual conversion, and 
that it is hard to say whether the pagan world 
was more modified by the Church or the Church 
was more penetrated and invaded by the manners 
and the religion that it was supposed to replace ? " 

— Agust Sabatier. 

"The idea of One Holy Catholic Church was 
not early developed in the consciousness of Chris- 
tendom. In the East this article of the Church 
does not occur in the creed of Ignatius, a.d. 107, 
nor in that of Origen at the middle of the third 
century, nor in the creed of Lucian of Antioch 
at the beginning of the fourth century. It first 
appears in the private creed of Arius, 328. The 
Nicene creed has no article of the Church, but in 
the Nicene-Constantinopolitan form it appears in 
all its fulness, 'One Holy Catholic and Apostolic 
Church.' This point was reached toward the close 
of four hundred years of Christian thought." 

— Wood, "Survivals in Christianity." 
166 



CHAPTER VII 

THE CHRISTIAN CHURCH 

It is plain that Christ had in mind a 
Church ; it is as plain that the thing which 
we call the Church is not the thing he had 
in mind. The difficulty which one confronts 
at the outset is to find the thing at all. To 
speak exactly, there is no objective reality 
to which the title " Christian Church " can 
be applied. There are churches a plenty, 
but there is no Church. If one fancy that 
there is, let him ask himself, Where is it ? 
Let him point to it, define it, locate it, de- 
limit it. If he urge that the hundreds of 
organizations which we call churches are 
actually the component parts of some great, 
all-embracing Kingdom, we can only say 
that he has not stopped to examine the 
content of his own thought. What he has 
in mind is the image of an empire which 
includes within it separate and partially 
independent states. That conception is a 
perfectly coherent and legitimate one. It 

157 



tian Church 
extant 



158 CHRIST 

is possible for an empire to be thus consti- 
tuted ; but only on the condition that the 
constitutive states act harmoniously toward 
a common end, and that the empire have a 
conscious will and purpose of its own. But 
this is precisely what the churches do not 
No Chris- do. They do not act together harmoni- 
ously ; they confront and oppose each other ; 
they do not work toward a common end, 
for they do not conceive the purpose the 
same way ; and the universal Church thus 
imagined has neither a conscious will and 
purpose of its own nor any organ by which 
to express it. " The One Holy Catholic 
Church " is a phrase to which no objective 
reality corresponds. 

Nor does it help the matter to reflect 
that no ideal is ever realized in this world 
except imperfectly, approximately. There 
is no perfect Government anywhere. All 
political arrangements are only more or 
less successful attempts toward realizing an 
ideal state. That is true ; and therefore 
we frankly recognize that there is no 
such thing as " One Catholic State." Mean- 
while each state within its own territory 
lives its own life. This, again, is what the 
churches do not do. They occupy the same 



THE CHRISTIAN CHURCH 159 

territory at the same time, and divide the 
citizens among them. In the political 
sphere we can indeed see a steady move- 
ment toward unification, and this move- 
ment has been visible for a long time. 
There are not one-half as many separate 
governments in the world to-day as there 
were even a century ago. So far as one 
can see, there is a much more immediate 
prospect of a Catholic State than of a 
Catholic Church. It is a startling fact The Church 
that the most potent divisive force at work force^the 
in human society is the Church. All other world, 
barriers are easier to overcome, all other 
schisms easier to heal. This is all the 
more amazing when we reflect that the 
organization of Christianity is an affection ; 
and that the dying prayer of its founder 
was " that they all may be one ! " The 
actual facts are indeed so monstrous that 
Christians habitually try to disguise them. 
They fondly imagine an ideal Church at 
some undefined date or place in the past, 
whose unity has been broken, but which 
we may hope to see restored ; or that the 
rivalries are not really rivalries, but emula- 
tions ; or that the Church is essentially an 
invisible, transcendental thing, not meant to 



160 CHRIST 

show concretely on earth. But these are 
only fond imaginings. However they may 
satisfy those who nurse them, the great 
open-eyed world knows better. 

Let us examine the situation as it actually 
is. There is no Christian Church, that is, 
there is no such world organization with a 
conscious mind and will, and organs to give 
them expression, and there has not been for 
fifteen centuries or more. Whether there 
ever was, or ever ought to be, is a question 
to be considered later. Instead, we find the 
Christian world divided ecclesiastically in 
three great sections. Each of these acts not 
only apart from the others, but acts habitu- 
ally with a view to thwart, restrain, or over- 
throw the others. Each has a separate spirit, 
a different organizing principle. The Ori- 
The Church ental Churches are organized around the 
of Dogma. princ i p i e f Dogma. The object which 

they place above all others is to conserve 
and hand down through the ages certain 
formularies which express what they con- 
ceive to be finalities of the truth concerning 
Christ. To this end all else is subordi- 
nated. They call themselves the " Orthodox" 
Church. The outcome of this spirit has 
been what might have been expected. It 



THE CHRISTIAN CHURCH 161 

has been intellectual stagnation and moral 
impotence. The Eastern Church sits to-day 
in its tawdry Basilica an embalmed corpse, 
robed in stiffly embroidered vestments, with 
a Creed in its dead hand, while the people 
bow before it with the forehead, and hear 
from its lips no voice which reaches their 
souls. Its people are devout, ignorant, su- 
perstitious ; its rulers are orthodox, cruel, 
punctilious of ecclesiastical form, and lack- 
ing in truth and ruth. A keen observer, 
who had great opportunity to know, has 
said that " the Russian Empire is really not 
an empire at all ; it is a Church, and its 
qualities are those which the Church has 
produced." This church has had a longer 
continuous life than any other, and so far 
as one can see, it has in the main missed 
the purpose of the Master. In any case, it 
stands remote from the rest of the Chris- 
tian world, understanding it little, and little 
affected by it. 

The second in order, both historically and The Church 
geographically, is the Church of Rome. As of mpire * 
the Russian Empire is, strictly speaking, not 
an empire, but a Church, so this, to be accu- 
rate, is not a Church, but an Empire. Its 
organizing principle is dominion. Its cardi- 

M 



162 CHRIST 

nal claim is Authority ; its cardinal virtue 
is Obedience. Its claim is in no way dis- 
guised or mitigated. It asserts itself as the 
true and only Church of Christ on earth. 
Its Pope is God's vicegerent and is infalli- 
ble. Within it there is eternal safety ; out- 
side there is no safety. Because God has 
ordained it so, it has authority over every 
region of human life and action, its only 
limit being its own judgment not to enter 
upon any given area. If it does not regu- 
late political or domestic arrangements, it 
is only because it decides in its own wis- 
dom not to do so, and not because it is 
without the right to do so. Its one aim 
is domination. To this it adjusts all its 
power and all its machinery. Its infor- 
mation is drawn from every quarter. Its 
The Roman ministers and officials are loose-footed Jani- 
bTptlzed m zar i es > wno ma y n °t take root anywhere in 
family life, or form human affections which 
may weaken or hamper their absolute devo- 
tion to the organization which they serve. 
Its characteristic title is " Catholic " ; it 
claims authority over all. It is the old 
Roman Imperium baptized. It believes that 
in this fashion it represents Christ's will 
and best carries out his intention. Is it 



THE CHRISTIAN CHURCH 163 

right in this judgment ? Is it likely to 
succeed ? 

The first of these inquiries I need hardly 
wait to answer. But the second is one 
about which well-informed men are slow to 
form an opinion. Personally, I do not be- The outlook 
lieve that any one is warranted in either Roman 
hoping or fearing that the Roman idea of Church, 
the Church will prevail. It has within it 
elements of great potency, as all must see, 
but has within it also the seeds of its own 
necessary decay. Looking over its history 
during the centuries, one is struck by the 
fact that at the times and places where its 
success has been most complete its over- 
throw has been most imminent. It ought 
to be borne in mind that this ideal of uni- 
versal dominion was not always held by 
the Roman Church. It took possession of 
the organization slowly, but in the end 
controlled it entirely. Nowhere else in 
history, probably, has equal patience and 
sagacity been displayed in working toward 
the realization of an ideal, and nowhere 
else more complete and iterated failure. 
From the sixth century onward for nearly 
a thousand years this organization dreamed, 
planned, labored, prayed, and fought for 



of Rome. 



164 CHRIST 

dominion over Western Europe. Finally, 
it gained its end. At the opening of the 
sixteenth century there was none to gain- 
say its will. King and artisan, scholar and 
peasant, were alike docile subjects of this 
ecclesiastical empire. But within it were 
gathering the forces for its disruption. Within 
a century it lost the British Islands, Scan- 
dinavia, the most of Germany, with local 
The failure insurrections throughout its whole domain. 
Then, with the same infinite patience and 
skill, it set about the task of reconstruction. 
Once again it succeeded within a more re- 
stricted area in Europe, but replaced the 
lost territory with a wider empire in South 
America and Mexico. Three centuries more 
have gone by, and during them it has lost 
its rule in France, Mexico, in South and 
Central American states, and finally in Italy 
itself. In all these cases, wherever the 
people have had opportunity to express 
their will by vote, they have turned against 
the Church, refused to do her will, re- 
strained her pretensions, secularized her 
accumulated wealth, expelled her agents, 
in a word, revolted against her principle of 
dominion. These things have happened too 
often and too uniformly to be attributed to 



THE CHRISTIAN CHURCH 165 

accident or to the unruly wills and passions 
of men or times. They can well be ac- 
counted for as the operation of a law which 
may always be counted upon to show itself Rome and 
when the time is full. Will the same cycle Amenca - 
be run in these United States, where the 
immediate destiny of the world is lodged ? 
One must needs fear it, or hope it, accord- 
ing to his wish. For history has an old 
habit of repeating itself. We may well 
remind ourselves, moreover, that history 
now runs with a vastly swifter movement 
than of old. Here is the same ancient claim 
of dominion, — nothing abated, nothing dis- 
guised. Here is the same patience, skill, 
and devotion in upbuilding. Here is the 
same semblance of success. Will there 
be the same revolt and overthrow ? And 
when ? 

The third segment of the ecclesiastical 
circle is that ill-defined aggregation which TheProtes- 
we call Protestantism. The spirit and zatk>ns gam " 
temper which differentiates it has been in 
the world always ; but in so far as it is 
organized, it dates from the revolt against 
the Roman claim to domination in the six- 
teenth century. With it we are more im- 
mediately concerned. How nearly does it 



166 CHEIST 

present Christ's ideal of a Church ? What 
is its outlook ? When one reads its history, 
from the time of Luther, Colet, Cranmer, 
Calvin, he is impressed by the fact that as 
an ecclesiastical force it has lost much of 
its original energy. Its course reminds one 
of a mighty shell fired by an enormous 
Loss of charge. While it held together its momen- 
veiodty. turn was terrific, but as it broke into frag- 
ments each fragment possessed less energy. 
When these in succession subdivided, their 
potential energy became still feebler. The 
explosive power which impelled it originally 
was the sense of individual liberty, — liberty 
of conscience, liberty of thought, liberty of 
action. When these are restrained or re- 
pressed, they gather an ever increasing ful- 
minating energy. But when they are set 
free, maybe with noise and commotion, 
they do not always quite know what to 
do with themselves. This is the condition 
of the Protestant churches. They are free, 
and they do not quite know what next. 
Liberty is a dangerous spirit to raise. The 
only power able to control it is Truth. But 
here they hesitate and fumble. A century 
ago each one had a Confession or a System 
of truth which satisfied it. It had a mes- 



Confessions. 



THE CHRISTIAN CHURCH 167 

sage which, whether true or faulty, it could 
deliver when challenged. But now the very 
spirit of intellectual freedom which they 
invoked has examined these doctrinal struc- 
tures, and in the name of Truth has con- 
demned them. Things w T hich they had Unstable 
thought settled for all time have been brought 
in question. Such essential portions of the 
Protestant message as its doctrine of future 
rewards and penalties, its denial of an in- 
termediate state of Probation, its doctrine 
of Holy Scripture, its conception of human 
nature, have all been forced open. 

The result has been to produce a hesita- 
tion and sense of uncertainty which bodes 
ill for its organization. This shows itself 
in a hundred ways. It lacks a clear and 
definite message to both heathen and Chris- 
tian peoples. Once it could go to the heathen 
with a heart full of pity for a man who, it be- 
lieved, would be consigned to eternal torment 
in hell if the missionary failed to reach him 
in time to save. It does not believe that 
now ; but it has not found clearly what 
motive will take its place and do its work. 
This shows even more plainly in the work of 
church extension at home. It might be diffi- 
cult to find a place where greater disingenu- 



168 CHRIST 

ousness prevails than here. Congregations 
of Christian people are exhorted to labor 
and give " to carry the Gospel to them that 
are perishing." With their gifts the mis- 
sionary machinery of the denomination 
plants a church in a community where the 
Gospel has been proclaimed for years, and 
where there are only too many churches 
already. The motive which is urged is not 
really the motive which controls. The aim 
is not really to " carry the Gospel," it is to 
extend and aggrandize the ecclesiastical 
organization. If any church actually be- 
lieves that outside of itself salvation is not 
to be found, this appeal is morally worthy, 
whatever may be said of its reasonableness. 
But if it does not believe that, one shrinks 
from giving its action a name. 
isProtes- It at least looks as though organized 

men? force? Protestantism were a spent force. It is 
uncertain and hesitating in its message ; 
its rivalries and consequent wastefulness 
tend to render it impotent ; it has lost 
the controlling position it once held in 
schools, colleges, and universities ; the la- 
boring classes have largely drifted beyond 
the sound of its voice ; the middle classes 
are less and less keeping holy its Sabbath 



THE CHKISTIAN CHURCH 169 

day. Its Revival machinery has to a large 
extent been abandoned as no longer effi- 
cient. General Booth declares that the Sal- 
vation Army as well as all other companies 
which set out with the single aim to " save 
souls," tend irresistibly to become instru- 
ments for the distribution of secular charity. 
An ever increasing number of people who 
have been counted within the Protestant 
churches are quietly dropping away. It is 
not so much that they have become hostile, 
or may be any more indifferent than they 
have always been, but they no longer feel 
any reason to continue the nominal connec- 
tion which they once maintained. It is not 
powerful enough as an organization to be 
taken account of, as Rome is, in political 
life. It is too incoherent to speak or act 
efficiently in the social sphere. It does not, 
as it once did, command the enthusiastic 
service of the religious individual. 

From all of these things, which are com- Defect of 
monplace facts within the ken of all principle! 8 
observant men, it would seem that there is 
something fundamentally faulty in all the at- 
tempts which have been made to realize con- 
cretely Christ's ideal of a Church. Where 
the exhibition of Doctrine is the controlling 



tions. 



170 CHRIST 

motive, it ends in Oriental stagnation. 
Where empire is its aim, it runs around 
within the closed cycle of Rome, through 
growth, dominion, tyranny, revolt, and 
around again. Where individual freedom 
is the goal, it issues in confusion and weak- 
ness. Neither Orthodoxy, nor Catholicity, 
nor Liberty, nor any nice balance of them 
all, can be the notes or the tests of the So- 
ciety which Christ contemplated. 
Twoobjec- Against this whole view two objections 
are likely to be opposed. In the first place 
the churches are actually strong and mighty, 
and are striving vigorously to conquer the 
world for Christ. Their statistics of growth 
can always be marshalled in such a way as 
to spell success. Nevertheless, their general 
course through a long period of time has 
been as I have set forth. In calculating the 
line of movement of any body one can only 
study that portion of its orbit which has 
been under observation. From that the 
equation of its curve is calculated, and its 
destination is predicted. 

The second objection is that it is incon- 
ceivable that the Divine Founder of the New 
Kingdom should have allowed its line of 
movement to be thus deflected to barren 



THE CHRISTIAN CHURCH 171 

issues. Could he have permitted such long 
time to be wasted while his people made 
and discovered their own mistakes? We God reveals 
can only reply by directing attention to J^J. 
what is God's actual way of doing things, covery. 
Nature ran out a myriad of aimless lines 
before she found that one which culminated 
in Man. How many more aeons were seem- 
ingly wasted before the New Man was 
reached ? One thing we may be sure of, in 
the New Kingdom, as in the old, the mem- 
bers thereof will be allowed to find out and 
retrace their missteps, let the time be long 
or short. 

The minds of Christians in all ages since 
have turned backward with a sort of help- 
less yearning toward the " Primitive Church." The lost se- 
It has been felt that it possessed a secret of primitive** 
power which has in some way fallen out Church. 
of sight. Probably no equally brief period 
of time has been studied so exhaustively as 
has the seventy years which followed the 
disappearance of Christ. During that time 
his Society spread with such amazing rapid- 
ity, exhibited such a unique life, was so 
sure of itself, moved toward its purpose 
with such an inexplicable courage, arrested 
and held the attention of the encompassing 



172 CHRIST 

world in such a way, as to compel the con- 
viction that it knew something which we 
do not know and wielded a power which 
we have lost. But the attempt to recover 
the lost secret has not been satisfactory. 
May it be that we have not sought for the 
right thing ? Theologians have scrutinized 
the Early Church to find out what it be- 
lieved. Ecclesiastics have interrogated it to 
find out its form of organization — whether 
it was Episcopal, Presbyterian, or Congre- 
gational, whether it recognized this official 
or that, and which was superior and which 
subordinate. Liturgists have studied it to 
find out whether its rites were celebrated 
in this form or that. Antiquarians have 
asked it curious questions about its manners 
and customs. To all these inquiries it vouch- 
safes but a meagre reply. And, what is of 
more consequence, it answers in a tone which 
shows that it deemed all these things of 
small moment. It refuses to say what its 
doctrine was, or what its polity. Any, or all, 
or none, of the interpretations put upon it 
may be correct. But its secret was not in 
those things. 

There are two conceptions of a Church. 
One is that it is an Organization, in form 



THE CHRISTIAN CHURCH 173 

analogous to that of a political State, but in is the 

. . . , ,. . T , . , Church to be 

spirit and purpose religious. It is a otate rea iized 

which includes within it all sorts of citizens, through or- 
ganization? 
a few who are intelligently loyal and de- 
voted, and many who accept its citizenship 
and share its benefits and protection pas- 
sively, without thought, by force of routine. 
It includes good citizens and bad. Its terms 
of naturalization are intentionally adjusted 
to admit and include all. Most of its mem- 
bers are such by the accident of birth within 
its frontiers. It is simply human society 
ordered in one way for religious life as it is 
ordered in another way for political life. 
The ideal Church in any country w r ould be 
one which is exactly conterminous with the 
state, and of which every inhabitant is ex 
officio a member. In its perfect form the 
Christian Church and the Christian State 
would be identical. The distinction be- 
tween sacred and secular would disappear. 
In fact, this is the conception of the Church 
which holds the field. It is true that the 
ideal is not realized, the Church is broken 
and divided, but each separate portion acts 
after the manner of a state. It fixes the 
terms of citizenship ; it counts all born 
within it as members ; it admits, rejects, 



174 CHRIST 

and expels as it may judge proper. It 
makes or unmakes citizens according to its 
own rules. If a member be expelled from 
one organization, he is free to apply for 
naturalization in another whose terms may 
be different. But the goal toward which 
all these petty religious states look is a 
condition of things when they shall all have 
negotiated terms of consolidation, and shall 
be fused together in one great Christian 
Church which will include all people. Was 
this the consummation which Christ had in 
mind when he projected his Church ? Would 
such a religious commonwealth be the Church 
of Christ? 

There is another conception which is 

drawn from quite a different sphere of 

The com- human life and action. According to it the 

Famny.° f a Church is not a State > but a Family. It is 
constituted of individuals whose bond of 
union is one altogether unlike that which 
binds citizens together in a state. Its mem- 
bers are related by blood, bound together 
by a common kinship, cemented by an 
affection. This affection springs out of 
their antecedent kinship. This Family is 
in the world, but not of it. It increases 
and multiplies, but by its own methods. 



THE CHRISTIAN CHURCH 175 

As such, it has no concern with the secular 
life in the midst of which it lives. It has 
its own ideals, its own activities, and finds 
its own satisfactions. It is not an organi- 
zation, but an organism ; not an aggrega- 
tion, but a brotherhood. 

Now it is commonly assumed that these 
two conceptions of the Church can live and 
act together ; that it can be at the same time 
a State and a Family ; that it can at once 
expand according to the ways of a state, and 
grow according to the ways of a biological 
kingdom. This cannot be. A thing cannot 
at the same time be built like a house and 
grow like a plant. The two modes of being 
are incompatible. To recognize this confu- 
sion in thought would go far toward setting 
the Church in the way to correct its prac- 
tical confusions. 

Any, one looking carefully at the Early The Broth- 
Church cannot fail to see that it thought of J^New* 
itself as a Family, and not an organization. Life. 
Its every act and word shows this. It was 
a little group of men and women, each one 
of whom felt within himself the thrill of 
a new life. They were "alive in Christ." 
They had been " born again," made " new 
creatures," " old things had passed away 



176 CHRIST 

and all things had become new " for them. 
They were bound together in this new 
spiritual kinship. It constituted for them 
a relationship far closer than friendship or 
even blood. So completely did it take pos- 
session of them that for a time they had all 
things in common ; neither did any count 
anything his own. To express it, they sold 
all their possessions and brought the pro- 
ceeds to the Apostles' feet for distribution 
among the brethren. Their motive had 
nothing in common with that which pro- 
duces " Socialism." It did not spring from 
any notion of "a common humanity," or a 
"love for all mankind." They took no 
account of mankind as such. As a fact 
they were denounced by their contempo- 
raries as " haters of mankind." When they 
spoke of " the brethren," « the faithful," 
"the saints," they meant those individuals, 
many or few, who shared with them the 
new life. When they preached, their mes- 
sage was " the resurrection and the new 
life." They imparted this new life by per- 
sonal contact. When the divine spark was 
kindled in any one, he was baptized and 
numbered among the disciples. He was 
baptized because, as St. Peter said of Cor- 



THE CHRISTIAN CHURCH 177 

nelius and his friends, " they have received 
the Holy Spirit even as we." There was no 
doctrinal test at all, in our sense of the 
word. There was no moral test save the 
evidence of the " new life." Nor by that 
did they mean any superior morality, but 
only the new spirit which they confidently 
trusted to produce the Christlike conduct. 
They met together in affectionate family 
groups for the Breaking of Bread. Such 
rites as they had were simple and natural. 
Such officials as they had were not sharply 
distinguished from the rest of the brethren. 
Their aim was to spread a new kind of life, 
not to organize and expand an institution. 
Their success was the most wonderful thing 
in human history. 

This " Brotherhood of the New Life " in Transfor- 
that form passed out of sight at the end ^Brother- 
of the first century, like as a western river hood int0 ^ 

_ . , _ _ Empire. 

disappears in the sand, b or nearly two cen- 
turies thereafter almost nothing is known 
concerning it. When it emerged again in the 
full light of history, its Gospel had become 
" Christianity." The upper room where the 
family group had broken bread together had 
become the gorgeous Basilica ; the elder had 
become the pontiff ; the simple Communion 



178 CHKIST 

meal had become a sacramental function ; 
instead of the little companies bound to- 
gether in affection, we find the great con- 
gregations strangers to one another ; instead 
of " disciples," it now embraces the popula- 
tion of the empire from the Caesar down ; 
instead of a band of brethren sharing their 
possessions with each other, we have a 
Church with imperial endowments. It has 
a hierarchy, liturgies, canons, creeds, disci- 
plines, machinery for propagandism, diplo- 
macy. In a word, the society which passed 
out of sight a spiritual brotherhood reap- 
pears a religious Empire. Was this a de- 
velopment or a transformation ? 

For a brief period this Ecclesiastical State 
The preserved a political unity, identified with 

nticai unity" the unity of the empire. But presently the 
empire began to disintegrate, and the Church 
broke up with it. From that time to this 
the political conception of the Church has 
continued; but there has been no time — 
not even for a single day — when one could 
point to any organization and say, this is 
the Church, or this. Now, at the beginning 
of this twentieth century since Christ, multi- 
tudes of good men are profoundly dissatis- 
fied with the situation. Their quarrel is 



THE CHRISTIAN CHURCH 179 

not with this church or with that one. 
They hold aloof from them all. But they 
are a kind of men which Christianity has 
produced. They hold Christ in unfeigned 
reverence. They are not sure whether or 
not they accept the definitions of him which 
the churches set forth in their formularies. 
They do not pretend that they could define 
him any better, though they feel that they 
would define less. They possess the same 
spirit which was in Him, many of them to 
a preeminent degree. But they have no use 
for a church. In Catholic countries they 
firmly refuse to yield it the personal submis- 
sion which it demands. There are indica- Christians 
tions, moreover, that the attitude of passive 
aloofness which they have there maintained 
for a long time is changing into active im- 
patience and hostility. In Protestant com- 
munities they refuse to acknowledge the 
divine sanction of any church. To speak 
frankly, the things about which they see 
the churches concerning themselves appear 
to them to be paltry and unreal. Their 
doctrinal discussions appear remote and 
academic. Their rites seem conventional 
and their teaching artificial. They gauge 
accurately the churches' real influence in 



unattached. 



180 CHRIST 

practical affairs, and they hold the opinion 
that the controlling motive of each one is 
to exploit society in its own interest. This 
is the class with which the Church must 
reckon. It is one which she has never 
before confronted on any large scale. Now 
it is increasing with enormous rapidity. 
One may rightly say that its presence is 
the characteristic feature of the religious 
situation. Among it is a large proportion 
of the leaders in every region of life. They 
are managers of affairs, administrators of 
charities, educators, college professors, gov- 
ernors of states, legislators and senators, 
editors of newspapers, judges, teachers, pub- 
licists, mechanics, and farmers. 

The primitive conception of the Church 
The Church has never perished. It has been oversloughed 
churches! 6 ^y the political imagery employed, but it 
has always persisted. Christians still speak 
of each other as " brethren," even in circum- 
stances where the epithet is less than appro- 
priate. They still have a definition of the 
real Church which they never apply to the 
actual one. They call it " The Blessed Com- 
pany of all Faithful People." The language 
which they spontaneously use at the times 
of deepest devotion always echoes the origi- 



THE CHRISTIAN CHURCH 181 

Dal thought. At Baptism the terms used 
to indicate the meaning of the transaction 
are biological terms. The subject is " regen- 
erated," "grafted into the body of Christ's 
Church." They are terms which would be 
meaningless in any political connection. 
Thej' throw back to a time when the Church 
thought in those terms. They speak of one its vital 
being "received as God's child by adoption," erms ' 
" dying unto sin," " living unto righteous- 
ness," " crucifying the old man," " sharing 
the death and resurrection of Christ," and 
such like. In the other Sacrament the same 
conceptions control. Its terms and symbols 
are vital, not political, ones. And for the 
reason that, as things are, at that Sacrament 
and there only the real Church is met with. 
It speaks its own language because there are 
no foreigners present. Was it wise for it 
ever to attempt a universal tongue ? 

Here, then, w r ould seem to be the key to 
the whole perplexing situation. The Church 
of Christ began as a new Family in the 
world. It was meant to grow according to 
its own law of reproduction. For a time it 
did so. Eventually, but slowly, it would 
have absorbed and assimilated all from 
among men who are ready to "be born 



182 CHRIST 

again." But the process was slow, costly, 

painful. When its pain was at the heaviest, 

the Emperor of the world offered it "all 

the kingdoms of the earth and the glory of 

them " at once, and the wearied Church 

accepted. Instead of transforming the world, 

The Bride the world transformed the Church. Thus 

duced^y the ^id the " fatal gift of Constantine " seduce 

Emperor. and mislead the Bride of Christ ! 

But if this be true in any real sense, what 
is there for the Church to do ? Can she re- 
trace her stumbling steps back to the fourth 
century, find the place where the path 
forked, and start anew along the other 
branch ? We may be quite sure she will 
not do this, except as a last resort. The 
dream of being a world power has been too 
long entertained for that. The habit of 
reckoning success by numbers has become 
a second nature. So long as by any means 
the numbers can be maintained, the habit 
will continue. But there are indications 
from every quarter that the Church may be 
forced to retrace her steps and resume her 
old ideal. Few realize how profound is the 
revolution which has occurred during late 
times in the relation between the Church 
and organized society. In Constantine's time 



THE CHRISTIAN CHURCH 183 

Christianity became the official religion of The Bride 
the state. From that time onward, for fif- byTh^Em- 
teen hundred years, the state built churches, peror. 
maintained them, constrained the people to 
attend them. This came to be everywhere 
regarded as the natural as well as the divine 
order of things. The force of statutes, the 
resources of taxation, the power of the com- 
mon law, could all be appealed to in the 
interest of the Church. This condition re- 
mained until the United States, the first 
government in the world to do so, decreed 
in her constitution that Congress " should 
make no law concerning religion." The 
far-reaching consequences of that provision 
were probably not dreamed of by any man 
then living. But it started a movement for 
which the world had long been preparing, 
the final outcome of which can only be to 
take from the Church's hand the staff upon 
which she had leaned almost throughout her 
journey. When she asked for liberty, for 
" separation of Church and State," she little 
realized what its effect would be upon her 
own fortunes. That effect has been long in 
showing itself. Long after the state officially 
withdrew its support, society from use and 
wont continued to do through pressure of 



184 CHRIST 

custom and public opinion that which law 
had once compelled. But we have now about 
reached the point where society follows the 
Constitution. We are, in spite of ourselves, 
being pushed, or led, back to the position of 
the primitive Church. That was a volun- 
tary association of the followers of Jesus, 
living and acting in the midst of a society 
w T hich took no account of it or its rules, 
except as they were won, one at a time, to 
submit themselves to the new Way. The 
Emperor has forsaken the Church which he 
seduced ! 

In proportion as the Church realizes and 
accepts the situation, will it find its path 
Protestants clear, though no doubt painful. But if the 
thepath. path is to be found, Protestants must find 
it. So far as one can see, the Roman Church 
has so completely identified her life with the 
idea of empire that to abandon it would be 
suicide. It may even be likely that, for a 
considerable time to come, her gain may be 
great by reason of the migration to her of 
those who have felt after the same ideal in 
Protestantism, without finding satisfaction. 
But even so, the obstacles in the way of her 
realizing her dream are multiplying as time 
goes on. Her ultimate failure would seem 



THE CHRISTIAN CHURCH 185 

to be inevitable from the nature of things. 
For the same reasons those churches which 
affect to maintain a nice balance between 
two incompatible conceptions of what 
Christ's Society is, must dwindle by the 
dropping away of those who find no satis- 
faction in them either way. But is it too 
much to expect that within Protestantism, 
where the individual soul is the supreme 
consideration, the disjecta membra of the Trueapos- 
Christian Fraternity may draw together and ^ succes " 
become a Christian Church in which the true 
apostolic succession may be rediscovered 
and perpetuated. Such a Church, pretend- 
ing to be nothing but what it is, with the 
sad experience of the centuries to enlighten 
it, would find Church Unity a thing already 
achieved. Its creed, discipline, and ministry 
would arrange themselves, for they would 
be, as they were originally, the natural ex- 
pression of its life. No doubt they would 
be substantially the same they have always 
been, but they would occupy a different and 
far less conspicuous place than that now 
generally allowed them. Its creed would 
be, maybe, less precise, but more vital ; its 
ministry less prominent and more service- 
able ; its discipline not that of rules, but 



186 CHRIST 

that inexorable law by which living forms 
choose and reject among the things they 
touch. 

Such a Church would be undisturbed by 
the exodus now occurring. It would see in 
it what it actually is, the automatic correc- 
tion of an erroneous census made mistakenly 
long ago. If the Church has been the victim 
of a miscount, and has been betrayed into 
leaning upon those upon whom she never 
had any valid claim, it is best to know the 
truth, and as soon as may be. For such a 
a member- Church many souls are waiting. Good men, 
like those I have instanced above, do not 
stand aloof from the organization as it is 
now because it is too religious, but because 
it is not religious enough. They would 
greet with sober ardor a Society which 
offered them the new and abiding life in 
Christ, and which took no thought at all 
for itself. For Christ's dictum is as true 
for a Church as it is for a man, "whoso 
humbleth himself shall be exalted, and he 
that exalteth himself shall be abased." 



" What could be easier than to form a catena of 
the most philosophical defenders of Christianity, 
who have exhausted language in declaring the im- 
potence of the unassisted intellect? Comte has 
no more explicitly announced the incapacity of man 
to deal with the Absolute and the Infinite than has 
the whole series of orthodox writers. Trust your 
reason and you will become Atheists or Agnostics, 
we have been told till we are tired of the phrase. 
Well, we take you at your word; we become 
Agnostics." — Leslie Stephen. 



188 



CHAPTER VIII 

THE CHRISTIAN GOD 

The good man of to-day is uneasy because 
he has lost his god. He is as the lusty youth 
whose hunger for love torments him because The twilight 
he can find no mistress to fold in his affec- of the Gods ' 
tions. The man of to-day is at bottom 
religious. He would reverence, adore, obey, 
a god gladly if he could find one who would 
satisfy him. In such case the primitive man 
would make gods for himself of wood and 
stone, paint and bedeck them with feathers 
and shells, and prostrate himself before 
them all content. The classic pagan would 
have fashioned idols from his imagination, 
endowed them with graces and passions, 
filled Olympus with them, and found satis- 
faction for his religious hunger in the poetic 
fancies which he wove around them. 

But w r e of to-day have neither the sim- 
plicity of the savage nor the imagination of 
the Greek. We are at once intelligent and 
practical. But we still possess the faculty to 

189 



190 CHRIST 

wonder and to worship. Who and what 
shall we bow down to ? A brilliant, but 
not convincing, writer has lately set forth 
his " Gospel for an Age of Doubt." Ours 
is not an age of doubt, it is one of hesita- 
tion and helplessness. It is a very serious 
age, with a grim determination for truthful- 
ness. It will not pretend. It is not atheistic 
in temper, it is at heart forlorn. Its rest- 
less energy, its feverish activity, its lust for 
business, are only in part due to love for 
these things. This world is to-day so much 
as it is to civilized man because the other 
world has never seemed so remote. 

The bewildering change and progress of 
the last few centuries has made for us a 
new earth, and we have not found a new 
heavens to correspond. The old one will not 
do. It is manifestly irrelevant. We will 
be wiser if we realize what the difficulty in 
the religious sphere really is. It has lost its 
"Great Pan old idea of God, and it has not found another 
to take its place. So has come about one 
of the most wonderful phenomena in the 
history of religion. There stand outside all 
the organizations of religion multitudes of 
the most pious men living. They are for the 
most part silent about it; I doubt if they 



THE CHRISTIAN GOD 191 

speak about it to each other. They often 
go to church, some of them regularly, but 
even there they sit aloof. They see their 
neighbors lifting their hands in prayer and 
kneeling in holy sacraments, with a wistful 
feeling of mingled pity and envy. They 
are often generous of their gifts to forward 
the cause, but even in giving they question 
in their own hearts whether they do well or 
ill. Their difficulty is fundamental. It is 
not that they have tried and rejected this or 
the other article of " faith." They stand 
apart from the whole religious structure of 
the ages, its churches, creeds, disciplines, 
theologies, philosophies, prayers, literatures, 
sanctions, and hopes. All these presuppose 
a God whose reality they are not able to 
see, and they look at all these things not 
with hostility but with wistfulness and 
helplessness. 

Let me be more specific. I lay down my 
pen and look around the shelves of the great 
theological library in which I write. " Theo- God hiding 
logical," — i.e. the Science of God. Here 
are ranged the sacred books of many cults, 
the great tomes of the early Fathers ; here 
is the apologetic literature of the Christian 
centuries ; histories of religious thought and 



himself. 



192 CHRIST 

religious institutions ; lives of saints and 
biographies of holy men ; evidences, confes- 
sions, systems, liturgies, hymns, prayers, dis- 
cussions, sermons. The one term common 
to them all is " God." I interrogate them 
one after another, — "Who and what is 
God ? " Some are surprised at the inquiry, 
some scandalized, some enraged. They 
have all assumed that the term " God " 
connotes a fixed and determined conception. 
They chide me as irreverent, they denounce 
me as disobedient, they pity me as blind. I 
am not blind, but 

"... I bend mine eyes on vacancy 

And with the incorporeal air do hold discourse. 

Nothing at all, yet all there is I see." 

"Where is This is the situation of modern men by 
God?^ thousands. "Where is now my God?" 
they ask in every mood, from flippant con- 
tempt to moral despair. Nothing less than 
the rediscovery of God will serve the occa- 
sion. Most of the medicaments offered to 
the spiritual malady of the times must avail 
little or nothing because the diagnosis has 
not been sufficiently searching. It is no 
mere phase of superficial scepticism through 
which we are passing. Half the men one 



THE CHRISTIAN GOD 193 

meets are " agnostics," and this whether 
they call themselves that or call themselves 
Christians. As Professor Flint truly says, 
" As regards knowledge of God, religious and 
irreligious men take up the same attitude. 
Both endeavor to persuade men that there 
is and can be no such knowledge, that the 
best attainable is to be content with unrea- 
soned and unenlightened belief." 

But that sort of belief is becoming more 
unsatisfying every day. Belief in a God 
about whom the believer avowedly knows 
not anything may be sustained for a time 
as a sort of religious obligation, or as a sur- 
viving habit, but sooner or later must be 
given up. One cannot stand on tiptoe for- 
ever stretching up his hands to the inane. 
He gets tired, settles down upon his feet, 
and goes about his everyday business. 
That is what men are doing. Numbers of 
them have given up all idea of ever getting 
hold of anything coherent in the realm of 
religion, and disturb themselves but little 
about the matter. Still larger numbers yet 
join with the worshippers and listen to the 
preachers, hoping that they may yet, some- 
how, be converted and enlightened. They 
are unwilling to face a life emptied of divine 



194 CHRIST 

things, but they find satisfaction in no divine 
person to whom they are introduced. To 
say that this is their fault, is to confess 
ignorance or forgetfulness of the truth 
that no man ever yet did aught else than 
run to meet God when he had once seen 
him. 

The idea of God as it floats in the mind 
of the average man is compounded of three 
or four inherited conceptions, each of which 
has to a large extent ceased to fit in with 
the other portions of his mental furniture, 
and all of which have grown to be impos- 
sible. 

In a certain sense we are all Hebrews ; 
we have inherited the great YAVEH from 
The Kingly Israel. Along with much else in Judaism 
and Paganism, the imperial Church took 
over the Hebrew God. ' That deity was con- 
ceived of as a great Monarch. He was a 
King among kings ; a Lord of lords. This 
earth was thought of as his realm. He sat 
on a " throne," high up above the sky ; the 
sun, moon, and stars were his palace lights ; 
when he spoke the earth trembled, and the 
sea and the waves thereof roared; he con- 
ducted the affairs of his Kingdom as an 
absolute sovereign ; because he commanded 



God. 



THE CHRISTIAN GOD 195 

a thing, it was right ; and because he forbade 
another, it was wrong : — 

M Making and marring clay at will. So He 
Thinketh such shows nor wrong nor right in Him, 
Nor kind, nor cruel , He is strong and Lord. 
'Am strong myself compared to yonder crabs 
That march now from the mountain to the sea ; 
I let twenty pass, and stone the twenty-first, 
Loving not, hating not, just choosing so. . . . 
As it likes me each time, I do ; so He. ..." 

He issued ukases ; he promulgated laws ; he 
directed events, and summoned offenders to 
be dealt with as rebels ; he was above all 
responsibility ; he was, in a word, the quin- 
tessence of Absolutism throned at the centre 
of the universe. Upon this theme the Old 
Testament composed its majestic music. 
We hear it reverberating still in Psalm and 
Prophet, and with a more artificial modula- 
tion, in Christian hymns. This conception 
of God satisfied. It fitted and was cor- 
related with the actual life and thought of 
the people who " bowed the knee " before 
him. Their political life was its reflection ; 
their social life was organized from the 
bottom up on the monarchical principle. 
At its summit was the King, and above 
him was the King of Kings. It is more 
than merely interesting to note the extent 



196 CHRIST 

to which the language of religion is to this 
day colored by the imagery of political ab- 
solutism. But this language was not origi- 
nally metaphorical ; it was meant to be 
exact, and was universally believed to be 
so. The honorific titles used in addressing 
this Deity were intended to express the 
literal reality. The political life of the peo- 
ple, and their central religious conception 
lay in harmonious relation to each other. 

Their idea of God, moreover, fitted easily 
with their scientific conceptions. To them 
Earth-cen- Earth was the centre of the universe. 
Around it the sun moved to give light by 
day and the moon by night. God's "throne " 
could not be anywhere on it, and, therefore, 
they looked for him high above, "in the 
heavens." They fancied themselves nearer 
to him on the mountain tops than in the 
valleys, and that Arcturus and the Pleiades 
were closer to him than even Carmel or 
Sinai. They thought of prayer as " rising," 
of God as " coming," " descending," " ascend- 
ing up on high," " visiting his people." Their 
science and their worship were adjusted to 
each other. 

Let no one flatter himself by imagining 
that his own spiritual conceptions are so pure 



tred science. 



THE CHRISTIAN GOD 197 

and unalloyed by entanglement with any 
physical basis that they can persist uninflu- 
enced by any revolutions which may occur 
in that lower sphere. Underlying every 
abstract conception is a physical image. 
This imagery is the very framework, the 
matrix, the determining form thereof. 

Now, two revolutions have occurred in 
the western world which make this inherited 
conception of God impossible. One of them 
has taken place in the political and the other 
in the physical sphere. Absolute Monarchy Human life 
has long since disappeared as a fact, and ti 2ed. cra " 
with its disappearance all those mental 
images, habits of thought, forms of speech, 
which were at home in it have come to seem 
remote, artificial, unreal. They no longer 
serve to express the realities of religion to 
a people who have ceased to use them for 
other purposes. Those old statesmen who 
contended for the " divine right of kings " 
on the ground that democracy led inevitably 
to " godlessness," were far more right than 
they knew. It has resulted in the dethrone- 
ment and exile of their God. Human life 
is too intimately unified to allow conscious- 
ness to act after one habit in the political 
sphere and after another in the religious 



198 



CHRIST 



Modern con- 
ception of 
earth in 
space. 



one. We can no longer represent God to 
ourselves as the " Great King," without 
straining to find the reality behind the 
image, and to frame that reality in some 
imagery drawn from our real lives. The 
trouble is, we find no image to fit the need. 
The other revolution has occurred in our 
cosmic conceptions. The Imperial Church 
was more right than it knew when it con- 
demned Galileo. For, if " the earth does 
move after all," it is not only the inter- 
pretation of the Scriptures which must be 
readjusted. The Church's God would ulti- 
mately find his throne attacked. The small- 
est part of the confusion wrought by the 
pestilent philosopher was to turn Astron- 
omy upside down, to transport Earth with 
her complacent tenant, man, from her proud 
place at the centre of creation into a paltry 
ball whirling about on the outer edge of 
space. It would in the end compel the 
abandonment of all those spatial forms in 
which their relation to God was framed. 
This necessity made itself felt but slowly. 
Men knew that the earth moved for many 
a day before they realized it. Heaven had 
still its old spatial relation to them, and 
they continued to look for God in the same 



THE CHRISTIAN GOD 199 

place their fathers had. They still looked 
upward when they adored. Their intelli- 
gence and their knowledge far transcended 
those of the devout Hebrew, but their every- 
day emotional life and their religious imag- 
ery were the same as his. Job and David 
and the Apocalypse caused them no intellec- 
tual confusion or emotional perplexity. At 
first the new knowledge only dislocated 
scientific conceptions. But as time has gone 
on, feeling has followed after knowledge, 
and worship has become dislocated. In 
fine, the world of to-day has moved so far 
away from the monarchical habit in its 
political life, and its conceptions of time, 
space, and motion have been so transformed, 
that it finds the inherited God of the He- 
brew and of the Imperial Church unrealiz- 
able. 

In our hereditary Pantheon we have also The God of 
a second God. This one derives from Rome Law * 
rather than from the Orient. He is the God 
of Justice. Mr. John Fiske has thus strik- 
ingly pictured him : — 

" I remember distinctly the conception 
which I had formed of him when I was 
five years old. I imagined a narrow office 
just over the zenith, with a tall, standing 



200 CHRIST 

desk running lengthwise, upon which lay 
several opened ledgers, bound in coarse 
leather. There was a roof over this office, 
Young John but the walls rose scarcely five feet from 
the floor, so that a person standing at the 
desk could look out upon the whole world. 
There were two persons at the desk, one of 
them a tall, slender, old man, of aquiline 
features, wearing spectacles, with a pen in 
his hand and another behind his ear; this 
was God. The other, whose appearance I 
do not distinctly recall, was an attendant 
angel. Both were diligently watching the 
deeds of men and recording them in the 
ledgers. To my infant mind this picture 
was not grotesque, but ineffably solemn, and 
the fact that all my words and actions were 
written down to confront me at the day of 
judgment seemed naturally a matter of 
grave concern." 

" To my infant mind this picture was not 
grotesque." The philosophy of the situation 
is in that phrase. That picture of God was 
sufficient to the boy, because it fitted into 
the boy's conception of life and the world. 
But what of the boy when expanding intel- 
ligence makes this picture impossible ? 
What of an age when its ethical movement 



THE CHRISTIAN GOD 201 

has left this bookkeeping God behind ? Judgment 
Let us not mistake the situation, however. 
The moral world has not at all lost the idea 
of judgment and retribution. It knows full 
well that " whatsoever a man soweth that 
shall he also reap." But it has learned the 
truth that this comes about not by edict, but 
in the order of things, that the equities are 
reached through vital processes, and not by 
means of judgments handed down from an 
eternal court of justice constantly sitting. 
The advance in moral intelligence has ren- 
dered it impossible to any longer find a place 
for the God of Calvin and Augustine and Ter- 
tullian within the region of ethical life. That 
God is irrelevant. It causes the same sense of 
confusion as it would to conceive of a book- 
keeper or an accountant directing the life 
experiments in a biologist's laboratory. Men 
have come to see that an individual life is 
not an isolated " case " to be tried and 
passed upon. It is bound by heredity with 
the lives which are before and after, and its 
moral issues are hidden in the life move- 
ments in the midst of which it is set. Thus, 
the Roman God of justice has followed the 
Hebrew God of Majesty away from the 
region of thought in which the world habit- 



202 CHRIST 

ually dwells, and has become vague, remote, 
unreal. 

But does there not still remain God the 
" Creator "? Is not this universe, which we 
see, so intelligently contrived and cunningly 
Themechani- fashioned that we are compelled by the very 
constitution of the mind to refer its origin 
to an Infinite Intelligence ? Dr. Paley's 
classic illustration has not lost its cogency 
for the everyday man. A stranger walking 
in the fields finds a watch. Neither he nor 
any other man has ever seen or heard of 
such a thing before. As he and his friends 
study its ingenious structure and discern its 
purpose, are they not forced to the conclu- 
sion that it was fashioned by some intelli- 
gent hand, and that it is not the product of 
any blind chance ? And is not the physical 
universe a mechanism as cunningly contrived 
as is a timepiece ? And must it not have 
a Maker ? 

No doubt; the "teleological argument" for 
the being of God is just as valid as it ever 
was. But this process never did yield a 
God of any value for religious uses. At 
most it points only to an infinitely skilful 
and powerful Architect and Engineer. It 
posits him outside of nature and of life. 



THE CHRISTIAN GOD 203 

It can attribute to him no quality save 
power. From any study of his work it can- 
not say whether he is well or ill disposed 
toward men, or whether he has any care 
concerning them at all. He, or we should 
rather say, It, is simply Intelligence and 
Power raised to the " nth " degree. No one 
can even give a guess as to whether it is 
moral or immoral, good, bad, or indifferent. 
It is a purely philosophical conclusion, and 
has not of necessity any religious significance 
whatever. The only emotions which that 
conception of God can awaken in the soul 
are awe, dread, wonder, or curiosity. It 
touches the mind alone and has no commerce 
with the conscience or the heart. 

Furthermore, the profound way in which Evolution 
the doctrine of Evolution has modified our ^ r * e re ~ 
habit of thought has pushed far away the 
Creator God by interposing between us and 
him the aeon long process of development. 
It is no doubt true, as John Fiske says, that 
Evolution brings more to the " argument 
from design " than it takes away from it. 
But all the same it does remove the creative 
action far from the place where the world 
had been long accustomed to see it. It 
has in fact " escorted the « Creator ' to the 



sentiment. 



204 CHRIST 

extreme frontier of the universe, with many 
expressions of consideration, and returned 
without him." 
The God of In this melancholy condition of things 
the bereaved world of religion has endeav- 
ored to console itself with the quasi-panthe- 
istic conception of a " God Immanent." I 
cannot but think, however, that this con- 
ception is too incoherent and evasive to 
serve the everyday uses of the average man 
who would worship. It lends itself readily 
to a sort of religious poetry. It does touch 
and quicken a sort of sixth sense with 
which certain favored ones appear to be 
endowed. It is no doubt true that he " is 
not far from every one of us " — 

" Closer he is than breathing ; nearer than hands or feet," 

but however near, he does not quite touch. 

. . . "The thin veil 
Which half reveals and half conceals the face 
And lineaments of the king" 

may be ever so thin. The soul may almost 
be able to draw it aside and touch the 
invisible — almost, but not quite. 

At this point speaks the Philosophy which 
controls the thought of our time. Its word 



THE CHRISTIAN GOD 205 

is, " God is Unknowable." This is not the who by 
judgment of evil or shallow men. It is can^ndout 
the deliberate conclusion of the earnest God? 
minded and best men. Nor is it an excuse 
offered by intellectual laziness or moral in- 
difference for declining a painful and diffi- 
cult task. It is the sober judgment of 
those who have tried "by searching to find 
out God," and have failed. It is the con- 
clusion of Christian and non-Christian phi- 
losophy alike. When Mr. Herbert Spencer 
had arrived at this conviction for himself, 
he preferred to state his conclusion in the 
words of Dr. Mansel, a dignitary of the 
Church of England. Spencer, the master in 
philosophy, formulates the dictum ; Mansel, 
the master in theology, phrases it ; Huxley, 
the master in science, gives it its name — 
Agnosticism ; Balfour, a Christian prime 
minister, indorses and extends it. "Who 
by searching can find out God ? " To the 
challenge of Job comes the reply of to-day, 
No one. 

What then ? Shall we abandon the prof- 
itless quest and turn to our work, our play, 
our loves, leaving the eternal riddle of the 
universe unread ? Multitudes are doing just 
that. You may find them on the exchange, 



206 CHRIST 

at the bar, in the counting-room, in the 
teacher's chair, at the forge and the plough, 
in the drawing-room and club, and, if you 
care to seek them there, in the brothel and 
the gaol. They do not wail with the forlorn 
Greek, " Great Pan is dead " ; but they act 
as the mourning Greek did after he had 
outworn his grief. They are without God 
in their lives. But no one who knows hu- 
man nature will look upon this as final, or 
even as likely long to continue. There are 
always souls athirst for God, — yea, for the 
living God. There is also that curious un- 
satisfying quality in life itself, that vague 
uneasiness which lies in wait for it, which 
assails it with obstinate questionings. No 
one need even hope or fear that the quest 
for God will be abandoned. Agnosticism is 
not the final word. It is, moreover, a be- 
lated word. God is " unknowable " ? Christ 
said so long ago. 
" No man Nothing is more surprising than the per- 

theF^her s i s ^ en ^ attempt to reverse Christ's doctrine 
but by Me." in this fundamental matter. Men still 
fancy that " belief in God " is a prerequi- 
site, preparing the way for one who would 
be his disciple. They therefore, with well 
meaning folly, assault the mind with " evi- 



\ 



THE CHRISTIAN GOD 207 

dences." They would establish first the 
being of God by means of arguments drawn 
from nature, from history, from intuition, 
from the reasonableness of things. They 
would first discover God, then introduce 
Christ as his Son, and prove the relation- 
ship. They strangely fail to note that 
should they be successful in this prelimi- 
nary task, Christ becomes superfluous. It 
exactly reverses his method. 

For "no man knoweth the Father save 
the Son, and he to whomsoever the Son 
revealeth him." " Ye have neither heard 
his voice at any time nor seen his form." 
" He that seeth me seeth him that sent me." 
" This is life eternal, that they should know 
the only real God and Jesus Christ whom 
he hath sent." " If ye had known me ye 
should have known the Father also." U I 
am the way, the truth, and the life ; no man 
cometh to the Father but by me." "No 
man knoweth who the Father is but the 
Son, and he to whom the Son revealeth 
him." " Ye have not known him ; but / 
know him ; if I should say, I know him 
not, I should be a liar like unto you." "I 
am the light of the world ; he that follow- 
eth me shall not walk in darkness, but shall 



Revealer. 



208 CHRIST 

have the light of life ; " and to the same 
purport throughout. And the only God 
whom the disciples pretended to know was 
he whom they called "the Father-God of 
our Lord and Saviour Jesus Christ." 

Here, at last, we reach the elemental fact 
concerning Christ. According - to his own 
presentation of himself, he is not primarily 
saviour, or redeemer, or exemplar ; he is 
Christ the the Revealer. He offers to uncover the 
hidden God. He declares categorically that 
without this action by himself the secret of 
the universe must remain forever unsolved. 
At long last the world's thought has come to 
agreement with him, so far as to be con- 
vinced that all the theological chimeras, all 
the fabrications of philosophy, all the airy 
structures called divine, are really not God. 
They are but names ; they express no know- 
able reality. Agnosticism has unwittingly 
become an apostle. This is a gain whose 
magnitude will be better realized in the 
times to come. In the difficult navigation 
of life it is much to have had those things 
which have been mistaken for harbor lights 
examined and shown to be but corposants. 
When it is once realized that all other avenues 
toward the Eternal Reality are cut de sacs, 



THE CHRISTIAN GOD 209 

men will be more ready to be guided by 
him who claims to be the Way, the Truth, 
the Light. 

What, then, is the essential significance 
of Christ to the world ? What but this, — 
he is " God manifest in the flesh." If the 
quintessence of the Gospel could be ex- 
pressed and confined in fit box of alabaster, 
it would be in that phrase. As to what God Empty at- 
may be " absolutely," we know nothing at all. d^ 68 ° 
Such magnifical attributes as Infinite, Om- 
nipotent, Eternal, Omniscient, Self-Existent, 
and the like, are only symbols to hide igno- 
rance, like the algebraic " x " or " n" They 
stand for unknown quantities, and they are 
not verifiable. " Eternal," for instance, is a 
symbol which one marks down at the be- 
ginning or the ending of his concept of Time. 
One sets his thought to moving either back- 
ward or forward through duration, and at 
the point where it falters and stops he 
writes " eternal " for what lies beyond his 
reach. So of all the other like phrases. 
They are not real but pseudo concepts, and 
can only be applied to a jpseudo God. What 
that being which we call God may be in 
completeness, we have no idea, and can 
never have any. We have neither imagina- 



210 



CHRIST 



The door in 
human na- 
ture giving 
upon the 
divine. 



tion to conceive nor words to frame it in. 
So to speak, we only know him quantitatively, 
— that is, we only know so much of him as is 
expressible in terms of humanity. We 
know the Son of Man, who was also the 
Son of God. 

But, having come thus far, we touch an- 
other essential element in the revelation of 
God in the person of Christ. I have said 
that we only know so much of God as can 
be expressed in terms of humanity. But 
humanity opens through one avenue, and 
through one avenue only, into the infinite. 
The flesh is circumscribed within the boun- 
daries of physical law. The mind has wider 
scope, but even intellectual action quickly 
reaches a point beyond which it cannot 
move. The conscience is let and hindered 
by the infirmity of the will. But the power 
to love is literally without bounds. So far 
as one can see, there is no limit to its field 
of action or to its duration. Unlike all 
other human faculties it appears to be inca- 
pable of fatigue. The more it works the 
more vigorous it grows. It has no point of 
breaking strain. It nourishes itself with 
the juices which itself supplies. It appears 
to be independent upon physical conditions. 



THE CHRISTIAN GOD 211 

Love is stronger than death. It is not con- 
ditioned upon intellectual vigor, and is 
largely, if not altogether, outside the oper- 
ation of the will. Through this rift in 
phenomenal being Christ exhibits God. 

For, when all is said, Christianity is an 
affection. All its institutions, its machinery, 
its codes and disciplines, are but vehicles to 
convey the emotion of Love. Its triumphs 
are all measured finally by the extent to 
which it has shown this affection. Its Christianity 
failures are all failures of affection. For J^ 51 ec ~ 
" God is Love ; and he that loveth is born 
of God." In Christ humanity discovers its 
Father who is in heaven. Whoso makes 
this discovery makes it through his affection. 

But, has not this discovery been made by 
countless men and women altogether apart 
from the historical person whom we call 
Jesus ? No doubt ; but if so by the same 
revealer. This is his own distinct claim. 
They who believe in the " divinity of Christ " 
must not shrink from the implications of 
their belief. If he be the " light that light- 
eneth every man that cometh into the 
world," it must be because he is a light 
shining wherever and whenever men are. 
Not less than this is his strange self-asser- 



212 CHRIST 

tion, " before Abraham was I am." " And 
other sheep I have which are not of this 
fold ; them also I must bring with me." 
These also " have the Son " and have life. 

The Christian God is neither Mr. Matthew 
Arnold's "Power, not ourselves, which makes 
The only for righteousness." Nor is he Professor 
Christian Huxley's " Force behind phenomena, the 
knows. same which wells up in us in self-conscious- 
ness." These are figments of logic, hypoth- 
eses whose chief service is to keep the 
intellect on good terms with itself. The 
most unreasonable thing in the universe is 
Love. It is self-willed, and laughs at wis- 
dom. It behaves like a prince among peas- 
ants, coming and going at its own pleasure. 
It is the only faculty we possess which can 
pass and repass the ring fence of what we 
call nature. It is at home in all spheres. 
Christ's dictum is that God is the eternal 
principle of Love, self-conscious and intelli- 
gent, receiving and returning the affection 
of all in his universe who have attained unto 
the " will to love." In himself the two af- 
fections meet, coalesce, lose their separate 
identities, fuse into a single consciousness, 
and become the God-Man. 

This is the only God the Christian pre- 



THE CHRISTIAN GOD 213 

tends to know. His knowledge of God is 
immediate. It reaches him through his 
affections. For "he that loveth is born of 
God." When the will to love, in which the 
new birth essentially consists, is awakened 
in him, he at once comes into a new relation 
with the universe. But that is the least 
part of it ; love hath a wisdom of her own, 
and shows him at the same time the brother 
whom he had not recognized, and the Father 
whom he had not seen. He is just as much 
at liberty to philosophize as is any other 
man. The argument from design, and the 
argument from the moral sense, and all the 
other bridges which men have tried to con- 
struct across the gap between Nature and 
God are as open to him as to another. But 
he has learned what they have not, that 
these bridges, firmly anchored and strongly 
buttressed as they are on the end which 
touches Nature, do not reach quite across. 
At the farther end there remains the chasm 
between the end of argument and the begin- 
ning of certainty. If God is to be known, 
he must come to us ; we cannot go to him. 



u We read in our books of a too nice Athenian, 
being entertained in a Place by one given to Hos- 
pitality, finding anon that another was received 
with the like courtesie, and then a third, growing 
very angry, ' I thought,' said he, i that I had found 
here a Friends House, but I find I am fallen into an 
Inne to entertain all comers, rather than a lodging 
for some private and especial Friends. 7 

" Let it not offend any that I have made Chris- 
tianity rather an Inne to receive all, than a private 
house to receive some few." — John Hales. 

"Then shall the righteous say, Lord, when saw 
we thee a hungered and fed thee ? or thirsty, and 
gave thee drink ? or a stranger, and took thee in ? 
or naked, and clothed thee ? or sick, or in prison, 
and came unto thee ? And the King shall answer 
and say, Verily I say unto you, inasmuch as ye 
have done it unto one of the least of these my 
brethren, ye have done it unto me." — Jesus. 



214 



CHAPTER IX 

THE KINGDOM 

The controlling principle of Christ's 
teaching and living is that the essential 
quality of the being whom we call God and 
whom he calls " Father," is love. There is The Divine 
the echo of a gracious patriarchal relation 
in his speech. He presents his " Father," 
not as a great king conducting the complex 
affairs of an empire, nor as a creator con- 
structing and regulating the complicated 
movement of the universe, but rather as 
some venerable and benignant Oriental sheik. 
He has children and descendants beyond 
count, and in their veins his own blood 
flows. He has flocks and herds, servants 
and estates, vineyards and fields. But as 
these have multiplied his children have 
moved away from and become unmindful 
of their father, and of their kinship with 
each other. This fact weighs, an eternal 
burden, on the patriarch's heart. They are 
indifferent to him, and they quarrel with one 

215 



216 CHRIST 

another. No machinery of government or 
law or threat or penalty can reach the situ- 
ation. The one thing and the only thing 
which can bring harmony out of the confu- 
sions of existence is the restoration of the 
family affection. 

But it is plain that this cannot be brought 
about by compulsion. The verb "to love" 
has no imperative mood. God can no more 
force a man to love him than can a man 
compel the affection of his wife or his 
neighbor. This is a place where coercion 
defeats its own purpose. Nor are arguments 
of any more avail. Love laughs at reasons. 
This is the explanation of the proven impo- 
tence of both Theology and Ethics. The- 
ology addresses itself to the intelligence, and 
Ethics to the conscience, whereas it is the 
affections which are primarily concerned. 
" My son, give me thine heart " is the burden 
of God's speech. 

The very most that Theology as a science 

can effect is to establish that the nature and 

action of God in the universe is probably 

The God of thus and so. But the crucial point, at 

wSut 7 which it signally breaks down, is in the 

heart. attempt to show that the God of thought 

has a heart. A candid survey of the actual 



THE KINGDOM 217 

facts of life leaves one in doubt as to 
whether he is well disposed or ill disposed, 
whether the world is controlled by a Power 
who wishes well or wishes ill or is utterly 
indifferent to the fortunes of men. Look- 
ing at the course of history in a large way, 
it is possible, no doubt, to discern in its 
movement " a Power, not ourselves, which 
makes for righteousness." It is possible, 
but it is not inevitable. For, while it is 
true that a steady progress in goodness and 
gentleness can be seen from time to time in 
this or that people, or race, or epoch, still, 
even these appear to be arrested finally by 
the stronger law of age and decline. 

11 So careful of the type ? But no, 
From scarped cliff and quarried stone 
She cries, ' A thousand types are gone ; 
I care for nothing ; all shall go.' " 

Even were it possible to establish the fact 
that the race is being steadily led forward 
in goodness, there is nothing to show that 
the Power which leads it has either hate or 
ruth for the individual. The old ditty has 
in it the concentrated experience of the 
ages, — 

" As I walked by myself I talked to myself, 
And thus myself did say to me : 



218 CHRIST 

' Look to thyself, and take care for thyself, 
For nobody cares for thee.' 

" Then I turned to myself and I answered myself 
In the selfsame revery : 
' Look to thyself or look not to thyself, 
The selfsame thing shall be.' " 

The most that any Ethical System can 
do, on the other hand, is to express an 
Ethical Sys- opinion, more or less weighty, that men 
fl e uous. UPer " ou ght to act toward one another thus and 
so. It may well be doubted whether men 
have ever been appreciably influenced by 
any scientific presentation of Morals. From 
Confucius and Aristotle down, the Moralist 
has been a speculator in abstractions. As 
Hudibras says of another sort of theorizers, 

"All the rhetorician's rules serve only for to name his tools," 

so of the Ethical systematizer. His achieve- 
ment is only to take a few instinctive 
"oughts" and "ought nots" which are 
already present in practice in human so- 
ciety, arrange them in the symmetrical way 
which he fancies, expound their relation- 
ships, and — with but scant success — try 
to trace their origin. There is no motive 
power in ethics, whether as a judgment by 
the individual, or as a law imposed from 
without. 



THE KINGDOM 219 

Not that Theology and Ethics are useless. 
The intelligence which craves knowledge of 
the Unknowable both will and ought to seek 
its satisfactions. The moral conduct of men 
needs regulation from day to day, and so- 
ciety must control it, with what knowledge 
it can gather from all quarters. But nei- 
ther of these have to do, except indirectly, 
with Christ's scheme of things. They do 
not concern that element in human nature 
to which he makes his appeal. 

It is commonly assumed that the disturb- 
ing element in life is that thing which we 
call Sin. But this is not Christ's view. It The disturb- 
is most significant that while he lived he iheuni- ein 
offended the moralist and the convention- verse, 
ally religious by what they thought to be 
the laxity of his moral judgments. Publi- 
cans and sinners were his daily companions. 
The woman surprised in the very act of 
committing the capital offence against social 
morals was rescued by him from her accus- 
ers, and dismissed with only a kindly warn- 
ing. The leman of Simon the Pharisee 
received from him no harsher condemnation 
than "she sinned much because she also 
loved much." On the other hand, Dives, 
whom he consigned to the torments of hell, 



Selfishness. 



220 CHRIST 

had not actively sinned at all. The Scribes 
and Pharisees, whom he denounced unspar- 
ingly, were probably as little liable to accu- 
sation as it is possible for men to be. 
ah Sin is His contention from first to last is that 

the evil in life is not sin, but Selfishness. 
It would probably be more accurate to say 
that he reached down to the fundamental 
truth that all sin is at bottom selfishness. 
There is really no other sin. All offences 
are, when analyzed, seen to be but allotropic 
forms of this one. Lust is but the longing 
to possess, without regard to the good of 
the thing possessed. Hate is but the cold 
determination to rid one's self of the person 
whose existence disturbs his sense of well 
being. Its final expression is murder, for, 
as Shylock says, " hateth any man the thing 
he would not kill ? " Theft is selfishness, 
pure and simple. So of all other "immo- 
ralities" whatsoever, they are but expres- 
sions of a personal attitude. Christianity, 
on the other hand, is Altruism. But it is 
altruism made dynamic. The amazing thing 
is that it should be persistently presented as 
self-seeking, raised to its highest power, and 
given the sanction of a religious obligation. 
For what else is the exhortation to the indi- 



THE KINGDOM 221 

vidual to " seek salvation," to " save his 
soul " ? And what other motive impels 
the monk and recluse to withdraw from the 
world of affections in the hope of finding 
his own highest good ? Christ's dictum — 
which is not a paradox — is, " he that sav- 
eth his life shall lose it, and he that loseth 
his life shall find it." It is the fundamental 
law of the Kingdom. 

Acting as his Father's representative, — 
and it is little wonder that with this well- 
beloved Son he was well pleased, — he 
enters human society. As he moves up TheAitru- 
and down among men, he finds them that lstlc e * 
are spiritually akin to himself and to each 
other. Of these his Kingdom forms itself. 
It is a relationship not only deeper, but also 
more real than that of race, or blood, or any 
earthly tie whatsoever. "Then came his 
mother and his brothers, and standing out- 
side the throng they called for him. And 
when they told him, Behold thy mother and 
thy brothers are outside seeking for you, he 
answered and said, Who is my mother and 
my brethren ? And looking about among 
the multitude, he saith, Behold my mother 
and my brethren. For whosoever will do the 
will of my Father, he is my brother and my 



222 CHRIST 

sister." What that will is of which he spoke 
is plain from the whole story. The Sermon 
on the Mount is the pronunciamento of his 
Kingdom. It is " Love." " Love even your 
enemies ; do good ; do good even to them 
that despitefully use you and persecute 
you." His Kingdom has place, therefore, 
not in the realms of knowledge or morals, 
but of the affections. 

Now, it will probably not be gainsaid that 
this is the primary article in the constitution 
of Christ's Kingdom, — in theory. But there 
is Christ's are two obstinate difficulties which must be 
cabfe? raCtl " o verc ° me before one can consent to subscribe 
to it and enroll himself. The first is : " All 
this is fair and gracious ; it is no doubt true 
in that region which you call the eternal re- 
alities, but our lives are to be lived on the 
surface of the world as we find it. In hu- 
man life, as it actually exists, to adopt this 
attitude toward one's fellows is neither 
practicable nor safe ; practically, it could 
only issue in the disorganization of society 
and the obliteration of the individual who 
orders his life thus." What can be answered 
to this ? 

Christ's answer is : " It is practicable, for 
I have done it ; it may or may not be safe, 



THE KINGDOM 223 

as the case may be." When it is once ad- 
mitted that sincere good-will on the part of 
each man toward every other man would 
transform this world from a bad place to 
live in to a good one, the question of its 
practicability will of necessity take a sub- 
ordinate place. The thing which is good, 
and which men know to be good, will in 
the long run prevail. But the run is a very 
long one indeed. At the stage of the race 
where we now are it seems as though the 
goal would not be reached within any 
measurable time. 

Let us say, then, that our word "love" Theweii- 
is probably too strong a term to use for ^ osed 
that temper toward one's fellows which 
Christ prescribes. As a rule, we reserve 
that word for one supreme and imperious 
affection. " Well-disposed " is a more ac- 
curate expression. The benediction is " to 
men of good-will." The affectional attitude 
of the Christian toward all men does not in 
any wise preclude him from those personal 
and intimate affections which constitute his 
own life. Every man is not called upon to 
love his neighbor's wife in the way he does 
his own. Nor is he at liberty to allow his 
complacency to ignore moral differences, and 



224 CHRIST 

be pleased with pharisee and harlot and saint 
alike. What is demanded is that he shall 
recognize his kinship with all his Father's 
children, and do for each the real best, — 
not, maybe, the thing which his brother 
wants, but the thing which is best for him. 
To love one's neighbor as one's self does not 
mean to love him in ways in which one has 
no business to love himself. That this is 
practicable has been proven experimentally 
ever since the first starving cave-dweller 
shared his bone with a hungry neighbor, 
or drove away with his club the marauding 
vagabond who would snatch his children's 
food. 

If one shall say, then, " Is this all ? Is 
is that ail? Christianity simply to do good to one's fel- 
lows ? " The answer is, Yes ; this is all it is. 
" For I was an hungered, and ye gave me 
meat : I was thirsty, and ye gave me drink : 
I was a stranger, and ye took me in : naked, 
and ye clothed me : I was sick, and ye visited 
me : I was in prison, and ye came unto me. 
Verily I say unto you that inasmuch as ye 
did it unto one of the least of these my 
brethren, ye did it unto me." 

But let no one mislead himself. Because 
this way of life is simple, it is not easy. 



THE KINGDOM 225 

The most exalted doctrines and the most 
exacting codes present far fewer difficulties. 
The person one is called upon to feed may be 
a stranger ; the stranger who asks to be 
taken in may be the man who has done one 
grievous wrong ; the sick man's sickness 
may be infectious ; the man one is called 
to visit in jail may be the very one who 
defrauded and bankrupted him before he 
was sentenced. The difficulty is very great 
indeed. If I love my enemy, I put myself 
at his mercy. If I disarm while my oppo- 
nent holds his sword in hand, he may run me 
through. If I allow myself to be solicitous 
about the food and shelter of my poor 
neighbors, I must withdraw just so much 
time and energy from my own affairs. If 
all men, even within a limited area, could be 
brought to begin this manner of life simul- 
taneously, it might be possible, but how am 
I to begin alone ? 

Christ's answer is, the way to begin is to The way to 
begin. He does not pretend to disguise the b eSn. 1St ° 
possible cost. Indeed, it would seem as 
though he had pointed to every conceivable 
peril which might daunt the courage of the 
disciples who first contemplated the experi- 
ment. He forewarned them that they should 



226 CHRIST 

be hated and persecuted ; that men would 
say all manner of evil concerning them ; 
that they should be cast out of the world's 
synagogues, and maybe killed. And they 
were. And so was he. But he assured 
them that not a hair of their heads should 
be wasted. There is no such thing as ulti- 
mate waste in any of God's kingdoms. But 
the goal toward which any kingdom moves 
is reached without regard to any apparent 
prodigality. This is to be said, however: 
the Kingdom is now so well established, and 
comprises so many individuals, that its law 
of life has been to a large extent adopted by 
the environing world. There is little danger 
now and here of crucifixion and the lions. 
Few men now adopt the law of Selfishness 
as their guiding principle. Competition as a 
governing method is surely disappearing 
from regions which it has controlled for ages. 
The strange phenomenon is even now being 
seen, — the principle of competition invoking 
the aid of national law to safeguard for it 
its old place in commerce ! 

Still, it is true and will for ages be true, 
The impe- that Christ's Way is so arduous that it will 
not be adopted by any without some imperi- 
ous sanction. This sanction he provides 



nous sanc- 
tion. 



THE KINGDOM 227 

when he makes it the way of Life, — not of 

happiness, but of existence. The Eternal 

patriarch is waiting, longing for the reign of 

love throughout his infinite estate. But he 

waits in eternal patience because there is at 

work in his universe a force which is sure to 

correct its confusions. This force works both 

negatively and positively toward its end. We 

have already seen that all Sin is Selfishness. How a soul 

We are now ready to see that selfishness, 1S estroye * 

when complete, issues in the extinction of its 

subject. As the circle of a conscious life 

contracts into an ever smaller circumference, 

it tends to become at last only a point, 

and finally to vanish. This is the process 

by which a soul is destroyed. It perishes 

of self-seeking. Infinite selfishness is soul 

suicide. « For he that loveth not abideth 

in death. Whosoever hateth his brother is 

a murderer ; and ye know that no murderer 

hath eternal life abiding in him." Because 

such a soul will not help, and is therefore 

useless for the eternal Father's purpose, it 

is allowed to follow its own chosen way to 

extinction, where it can no longer hinder. 

Allowed to do so ? There is no power in 

the universe which could prevent it, except 

itself. 



228 CHRIST 

Over against this the same force operates 
in the opposite direction. He that spendeth 
findeth. The outgoing of the soul in love 
and good-will, so far from dissipating and 
How a soul weakening its own energies, enhances and 
eternal* fortifies them. As we have said before, the 
affections are the only human faculty in- 
capable of fatigue. Thought grows weary 
with work ; the emotions cannot long sus- 
tain stimulations ; but love never tires. 
Many a man has discovered, to his surprise 
and maybe consternation, that when he 
begins a task of charity he becomes entan- 
gled in it. It overmasters him and his. It 
draws him out and on to issues larger than 
he had contemplated, and it does so because 
through it his own being grows larger and 
stronger. "For every one that loveth is 
begotten of God and knoweth God. He 
that abideth in love abideth in God. And 
what shall it profit a man if he shall gain 
even the whole world, and lose his own 
existence in the doing it ? " In other words, 
only he that loveth liveth. 

This automatic force is the " Fan in the 
hand " of the Son of Man, winnowing for- 
ever, separating the chaff from the grain on 
the world's threshing-floor. Thus the king- 



THE KINGDOM 229 

dom is being builded. Who belong to it? TheKing- 
They who will well to their fellows. Where C hu" C hes. 
is it to be seen ? Ideally, it should be con- 
terminous with the Church. Actually, it is 
not so. Some time we may hope it will be 
so, as the Master contemplated. But can- 
dor compels the sad confession that before 
that time the Church must learn to love. 
Organizations learn this far more slowly 
than persons do. There is a great multi- 
tude whom no man could number within 
those societies which we call churches, who 
would gladly walk together in unity and 
live as brethren together in one house, who 
are let and hindered from doing so because 
the organizations, as such, have not the mind 
of Christ. Instead of humbling, they exalt 
themselves ; instead of living in harmony, 
they talk of " the brethren " ; instead of 
considering each the things of another, each 
seeks the things of its own. It could not 
be otherwise, since for these many centuries 
they have thought of the Kingdom as rest- 
ing upon a Creed and a Code. Some state- 
ment of truth addressed to the intelligence, 
and some formulated commandments to 
regulate conduct, are regarded as complet- 
ing the essential equipment of a church. 



230 CHRIST 

But neither of these is the organizing prin- 
ciple of the Kingdom. The stuff of which 
that is built is not supplied by the under- 
standing or the conscience, but the heart. 
So comes the paradox that a church whose 
members are generally "children of the 
Kingdom" may be an organization which 
exhibits precisely those phenomena which 
the law of the Kingdom denounces. It may 
act toward other churches as no Christian 
would think of acting toward another Chris- 
tian. In a word, it is loveless. Whether 
it be true or not that " corporations have no 
souls," it is approximately true that churches 
have no hearts. They act, indeed, amazingly 
like corporations. The first and chief end, 
to which all else is subordinated, is increase, 
extension, success. If their doctrine and 
their discipline be defensible and efficient, 
they fancy themselves secure. 
Waiting for He who listens attentively to the multi- 
reiSo V n al ° f tudinous voices of our world of to-day will 
learn that it is well disposed toward a re- 
vival of religion. But it must be a religion 
which will satisfy its real longings. Its 
mind has been for two or three generations 
stimulated to a preternatural activity. It 
already begins to show the symptoms of 



THE KINGDOM 231 

that lassitude which surfeit causes. It has 
also received and assimilated the contents 
of that great generalization which is ex- 
pressed by " the reign of law." It is no 
longer in the mood to be moved by a re- 
ligion of thought or a religion of restraints ; 
but it is groping with all its ringers to find 
a religion of good-will. General Booth 
notes with wonder that every revivalistic 
effort now attempted tends in spite of itself 
to become a charitable instrumentality. It 
starts out " to save souls," and it ends up 
by " going about doing good." The trans- 
forming compulsion is nothing else than 
Christ in the midst of the ages. But be- 
cause the phenomena of Love are vastly 
more difficult to organize than those of 
thought and conscience, they have been 
looked at askance by those who would trans- 
late the Kingdom into some well-rounded 
and articulated institution. The energy of 
the Christian world tends steadily to escape 
from their institutions and to express itself 
in good will. Why not recognize in this 
the working of a true instinct ? Why should 
not the Church make the presence of this 
spirit in the individual the condition, and 
the only condition, of membership ? Does 



232 CHRIST 

it not in its actual working expose itself to 
the rebuke which the disciple met when he 
forbade a man to cast out devils " because 
he followeth not with us," or those others 
who would have kept the foolish little chil- 
dren from him ? Is there a church on earth 
to-day which will open its gates hospitably 
to the man who says simply that he wills 
well to his fellows, and that in the Son of 
Man his soul recognizes the Son of God ? 
And if it be true that of such are the King- 
dom of Heaven, how can the Church, lacking 
them, represent the Kingdom ? 



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ESSAYS ON THE MEANING OF LIFE 

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